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Posted Thursday, June 28, 2012 by Dave Thornton in Android General
 
 

Samsung Increased RAM for Jelly Bean on Galaxy S3

With the release of Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean), that was thought to be an incremental upgrade to, improve user overall experience including some intriguing extras, you would have thought that Google would have informed manufacturers of the hardware requirements needed to run JB, right! You would think, logically, that devices running Ice Cream Sandwich would be able to run JB, right! Well Google have however, not given any details regarding the size of JB!

Many devices running ICS have 1GB RAM, which is now thought may not be quite enough to run JB. Now it transpires that Samsung’s engineers were not sure sure of JB’s final hardware requirements so they increased the internal RAM to 2GB on certain devices. The problem comes as in the international version which carries only 1GB of RAM, might not have enough spare RAM required to install JB. Which happened to the dear old HTC Desire, sporting just 512 RAM. If you wanted ICS you had to root it and do some crafty update that was supplied by no other than the XDA developers, along with MoDaCo.

No word yet from Samsung, on the update calendar of the Galaxy range but, we do expect them to take JB, even if the lower end of the range might have to take a reduced JB, or should we say a “Slimmed Down” version Jelly Bean.

Although I conclude that the upgrade to 2GB RAM is more than probable the reason for the delay in USA/Canada shipments

But I don’t know what’s more disturbing about this report from The Verge (link below), the fact that engineers decided to upgrade the RAM on only some Galaxy S3 models to make sure those models will get Jelly Bean, or the fact they were not sure what Jelly Bean’s hardware requirements are. For a flagship device like the Samsung Galaxy S3, launched around the same time Jelly Bean is announced, upgradeability to future Android versions should be a certainty. Imagine what would have happened in case the Galaxy S3 Jelly Bean would have been available only to certain versions, say the ones that have more RAM!
Of course, that doesn’t appear to be the case, especially since Google announced that Jelly Bean will be rolled out to three “old” devices in July including the Nexus S, Galaxy Nexus and Motorola Xoom. Neither device comes with 2GB of RAM on board – in fact the Nexus S only has 512MB of RAM. That also means that at least in theory, more high-end Android devices launched in late 2010 and in 2011 should be bumped up to Jelly Bean in the following months, especially if they have already received their ICS taste.

Source: The Verge

Dave Thornton

Many yrs ago Dave was MSDN trained, a web designer and computer shop owner. Loves walking his dogs, Lab & Welsh border collie. Golden Retriever. Plenty of fields around where he lives in Dundee, Scotland and is 2 miles from the beach.

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