Sony Xperia XZ and 3GB of RAM

[edmonddantes182]

Hey everybody, when Sony announced the XZ and X Compact I got super excited as I love Sony's prod. However, I don't get why the XZ (which I believe replaces the Performance as the current flagship now?) still has 3GB of RAM. Sony hasn't updated the RAM in their phones since 2014 with the Xperia Z2. I feel like Sony should've put 4GB of RAM in the XZ just to stay even more in the competition. This is just my opinion, what do you guys think?

[Sunking1011]

That excuse stopped working for Apple. Until a couple of years ago they only had 1GB and suffered awful reloading. The 7+ now has 3GB of RAM and iOS is wayyyy more optimised than Android. On top of that Google still haven't sorted out the horrible memory leaks in Android (even with Nougat) so yes, throwing RAM at the problem is the best bet. 4GB is the minimum I'd want on a flagship Android phone purchased in late 2016 if I intended to keep it for more than a year.

[HazemB]

Why is Sony Xperia™ stuck with the 3GB RAM since the Xperia™ Z2??

[Lord_viridis]

Because so has everyone else up until just the last 6 months and on those cases, they need more because they have very poor ram management.

[CameronT]

Hi @HazemB,

3GB is more than enough for current applications. 1GB is used by Android, leaving 2GB free. Android manages RAM very effectivey, allocating the RAM to the current app, unloading apps that aren't used for a certain amount of time.

An Android device should be using all or nearly all of it's available RAM to maximise effectiveness.

[Lord_viridis]

Exactly that^^^
You'll find with "some" other brands, their launchers use absolutely shedloads of ram, forcing Android to close background tasks as it's designed to do. Adding more ram "hides" this and allows more background tasks to remain open than just 4-5 due to launcher being a hog.
Xperia home is very light and won't act in the same way as more hungry launchers.
On a modern, optimised handset, 3GB is ample, and keeps the system nice and snappy

[Sunking1011]

@viridis

Android itself has huge memory leaks, apparently still not fixed in Nougat and so manufacturers are throwing RAM at the problem. 4GB of RAM would have futureproofed the XZ for a year or two.

[Lord_viridis]

Not necessarily, keeping untold amounts of processes running in the background could also impact battery life if they are still running active processes. You could easily end up with lagging system or, like in the case of many Galaxy devices, apps restarting due to poor ram management.
I can't comment on Nougat, because on an Xperia it's not been seen yet, but with mm, the one thing Sony has got right is proper management of background tasks.

[WarmWinter]

No official explanation from Sony itself, but people speculating it.
1. With Sony's very light user interface, more than 4 GB is not needed. Because It will only reduce battery life, which Sony said as one of strong point of their phones. But I find some other phone with bigger RAM but has better battery life. So I'm not sure about it.

2. Trimming the fat, to cut cost. High performance RAM is expensive, and I'm sure Sony won't bother to use cheaper ones with low performance. Maybe.

[Sunking1011]

Other manufacturers manage to put 4-6GB of DDR4 RAM into their phones....along with faster internal memory too. The XZ contains a mixture of midrange and flagship specs.

[CameronT]

Hi @WarmWinter,

I am here representing Sony, you can see my response above. Viridis is also very much correct on the matter :smileysmileythumbsup: