Galaxy A52 RAM Plus Update Is Hopefully The Start Of A New Trend

There seems to be a small movement afoot in the Android smartphone market that will hopefully become big enough for Google to take notice. It started with OPPO and Vivo and has eventually made its way to Xiaomi. Now it seems that Samsung is also jumping on the bandwagon with the latest update to one of its mid-range Galaxy A series phones. With the Galaxy A52 getting the company's new RAM Plus feature, virtual memory could hopefully become the next big thing in Android phones.

The Galaxy A52 isn't exactly that noteworthy, at least not compared to the Galaxy A52s and Galaxy A52 5G, both of which go beyond LTE networks. The mid-range phone makes do with a non-5G Snapdragon 720G and only 4GB or 6GB or 8GB of RAM. That, however, makes it the perfect recipient of Samsung's latest update.

The October 2021 update to the phone brought more than just security fixes. It also sneaked in RAM Plus, giving the phone an additional 4GB of RAM. Of course, this doesn't come without a cost to internal storage, but, thankfully, the phone still has a microSD card slot.

Virtual RAM is actually old technology that has been around for almost decades on desktop operating systems but is finally making its way to mobile. It allocates a portion of internal storage as a sort of backup for actual RAM, giving the operating system more room for apps, especially for multi-tasking. Because of the discrepancy between RAM and flash storage technologies, virtual RAM or swap is always slower than hardware RAM, but it still offers a necessary buffer.

This feature can be implemented at the OEM level, where manufacturers have the knowledge necessary to fine-tune the experience for users. Ideally, however, this should be on a deeper level so that all Android devices can take advantage of it. With Samsung pushing RAM Plus to more phones, it might become popular enough for Google to finally offer a standard implementation for Android.