A lot has happened since the Motorola Altrix 4G was the first mass-selling smartphone with 1GB of RAM back in 2011. This memory capacity, also integrated into the Galaxy SII, was incredible at the time, but things moved quickly. In fact, after these launches, we wondered if it’s not too early for mobile phones with 2 GB of RAM. One wondered if the 4GB of RAM already in mobile phones in 2015 was of any use or just for marketing purposes.

Now we have to ask ourselves the following slightly modified question: Isn’t it too early for 24 GB mobile phones? more Does a mobile phone with this amount of memory make sense? The new Nubia Red Magic 8 Pro+ tries to show just that, a terminal that boasts exactly this amount of RAM in its most ambitious variant. The question, of course, is what we might need it for.

The orientation of Red Magic 8 Pro+ is clear: gaming. This orientation is also a great argument for this absolutely surprising design decision: although we have seen various terminals with up to 12 and 16 GB of RAM, this is the first terminal to have 24 GB of RAM. Yes, it’s a China-only version and the price is as follows:

Source: Steam Hardware and Software Survey

This amount of memory is actually higher than that found on most users’ PCs and laptops.. The normal thing in these times is to have 16GB of RAM, this is something evident in the Steam database, for example: according to the data this platform collects – it’s purely aimed at PC and laptop gamers – one in two users has it. 16GB of RAM and only a fifth have more than 16GB.

But of course, a PC or laptop with a PC or laptop operating system needs to be ready to do more than a mobile phone does. And best of all, to do more things at once: while on mobile phones it is normal for everything to be focused on a single application with a magnified screen, on our computers we are used to performing several tasks or, for example, having several. Example of a browser with lots of open tabs on it.

This makes it inevitable to make this comparison with Nubia mobile. Is there a situation where this 24 GB will be needed? It’s true that there are very demanding games and they use memory intensive for the enormous resources (e.g. textures) used in those games, but it’s also true that mobile game developers know by what margins they’re moving the game. industry: you don’t have to develop a game that uses so much memory that only a few mobile phones can run it reliably.

The operating system created by Google was not designed to take advantage of large amounts of RAM. In fact, what it constantly does is try its best to keep working even on terminals with very little RAM. Thus, when we switch from one app to another, Android “garbage collection“; freeing up the memory of apps that are no longer active. This means that when we switch from one app to another, the app restarts as if it hadn’t been opened before (although we don’t think so).

There seems to be no other scenarios where this memory is not excessive: it would undoubtedly be useful if we surf the mobile especially heavily and have a lot of applications in the background, but a priori 24 GB would be easily exploitable in traditional scenarios.

At least, not now.

That’s a big tribute, because while 24GB might seem like a lot of GB today, it might not seem like it two years from now if this cell phone, armed to the teeth, continues to fight. Maybe then use cases that make good use of RAM memory capacity will start to emerge.

Between them For example, there is the world of artificial intelligence.. Being able to run a ChatGPT style chatbot locally would benefit greatly from that 24GB of RAM. Not to mention the ability to render images with models like Stable Diffusion: Qualcomm recently gave a technical demonstration where it fully enabled this capability in a prototype that didn’t reveal much detail.

There are other possibilities, of course, including the recommendation of mobile phones that make better use of this maneuvering space to become true desktop PCs. Developments like Samsung DeX allow for this, and while this manufacturer seems to have left this option in the background a bit, there is talk of how the Pixel 8 could once again introduce that “desktop mode” that turns our mobile phones into a unique desktop. PCs.

And then, of course, there’s the fact that it never hurts. have all the space to maneuver we can afford. We probably won’t be able to take advantage of the Nubia Red Magic 8 Pro+’s staggering 24GB of RAM anytime soon, but you never know what’s going to happen in the future.

Xataka on Android | All about mobile RAM: what it is and the role it plays in the performance of your smartphone