Today I was working on a ruggedized Android cell phone from Ulefone and saw what seemed to be a new feature they called MemFusion. After a couple of minutes Of playing around with my own Samsung S22 that you can see on the left in the picture below, I figured out what it was:
CLICK TO EXPAND
Samsung RAM Plus, UleFone‘s MemFusion and Memory Expansion are all just marketing terms for taking a chunk of your cell phone storage and dedicating it to your phones memory. It’s what we now call a Virtual RAM.
What Is RAM Plus, MemFusion, Memory Expansion Actually Doing?
RAM Plus, MemFusion, Memory Expansion are shrinking the existing partition on your cellphones storage, creating a new partition and dedicating that partition for use only by your phones memory.
Back in the day Virtual Memory was very slow but needed if you had large applications that required lots of expensive memory you did not have. Today these Virtual RAM files operate thousands of times faster because your cell phone and nearly all PC’s don’t use slow spinning disks, just different types of memory.
If the “memory” is made of memory chips and the “storage” is using memory chips, why is your cell phone’s memory different from your cell phones storage?
What is Memory?
“Memory” is extremely fast chips that store data temporarily. When your phone is restarted or the battery drains to zero and dies everything that’s in memory is wipe clean.
What is Storage?
“Storage” (in cell phones) uses different memory chips which are much slower than “memory” but survive the removal of electricity. That means you can have your cell phone power off or drain the battery all the way to zero without losing your data.
So these RAM Plus, MemFusion, Memory Expansion solutions are taking “storage” memory and making it available to your cell phones fast ‘real’ memory’
Does RAM Plus, MemFusion, Memory Expansion Help?
In most instances enabling or expanding these virtual memory configurations will do nothing that you will be able to notice. However there are instances where they could make huge differences, Included when you are running a large number of programs at the same time. In the future these settings will be helpful when even single programs require more memory than what your cell phone has inside of it. You know you can’t exactly open up your phone and solder in more memory chips so this feature may help you keep your expensive cell phone a year or two longer.
The bottom line is this is a nice feature to have but don’t get confused by the marketing buzz and think it’s going to make much of a difference for you today.
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