I have to admit that, like Rita el-Khoury, when I saw the proud boast by a Palm Pre Plus reviewer that they had managed to run 50 apps at once in its 512MB of RAM, I'd thought: well, some Symbian devices of yesteryear and a few from today could match that. Rita's taken the time to demonstrate this on the Samsung i8910 HD, managing 50 apps (and more) at once in only 256MB of RAM. Cool little post. Though I reckon I could get close to 50 on the unmodified Nokia N95 8GB, E90 or E71, for example. Anyone care to try?
Read on in the full article.
Adam Fullerton did that demo. Right? Using modified firmware.
EDIT: And Rita too! 😊
From the changelogs, those ROMs don't appear to reduce the number of things running - rather it looks like the developer has changed some of the configuration files and removed a bunch of visual things that waste time.
The two things that he does mention explicitly for RAM both *increase* ram usage rather than decrease it - he's increasing cache sizes in a few places.
How much memory does an i8910 normally have free?
The amount of applications one can run on a phone concurrently is more or less a trivia fact (except when the number is 1), mainly because who is ever going to run 50 apps at once? Ok, I did get close to 15 once but it hasn't happened again... lately :tongue:
This is still really cool to see for the geek in me. 😊
P.S. I'll be trying this on my E90 tonight, will report later on my results.
Update: As Austin Powers would say : Yeah baby!
Skyfire
Opera mini
Opera Mobile
Web - all opened on the AAS homepage
Resco photo viewer
Bluetooth
Gallery
RealPlayer
Music Player
Flash Player
Nokia Messaging
Active Notes
Notes - Nokia was cutting down on the clutter when they put both in :P
Gravity
File Manager
Adobe Reader
Quickoffice - with a 5 page document opened in it (would've opened a larger document but I didn't want to push it)
Fring
App. Manager
Calendar
Calculator
Contacts
Messaging
Ovi Maps
Google Maps
Log
Settings
Joikuspot
Zip
FreeUnRAR
Checked with Handy Taskman and I had 4.28 MB free after this.
I then tried opening Mystery Mania, and half of them closed, I didn't even know Symbian can force close them like that, I was expecting an "Out of memory" message. It was actually rather anti-climactic X)
Latest Firmware:
Adobe PDF
Here and Now
BBC iPlayer
ScreenSnap
YouTube
Google (the application...)
Shazam
Opera Mobile
Mail For Exchange
Skype
Flash Player
RealPlayer
App. mgr.
Share Online
Location Tagger
Quickoffice
Calendar
Handy Weather
Search
Contacts
Messaging
Settings
File mgr.
Bluetooth
Web
Ovi Store
Clock
Calculator
Gallery
Camera
Gravity
Google Maps
Music Player
Log
Internet radio
Opening up Ovi Maps made it angry 😛
So that's 35 applications...
I could run more than 30 on the SE P1 (128mb of RAM)
Steve, as much as I like the free publicity and ego boosts on AAS, I don't like getting credit for work I didn't do. The post (as well as the whole experience on the i8910) was done by Adam Fullerton, a guest writer on the site. I just formatted his document into blog-material and uploaded the images to our server 8-)
Managed 38 apps on my N95 8Gb, including Opera Mobile, Opera Mini, Coreplayer, Lcg Jukebox, Profimail, BBC Iplayer and most of the built in apps such as Contacts, Log, Podcasting, Web, Music Player, N-Gage client etc
Ran Energy Profiler for a few minutes to see the impact on the battery
With GPS on, Wifi continuously streaming data, active Packet data, etc it's not surprising the battery's getting hammered.
well my n79 ( and without a fresh reboot) managed 33 apps
google maps
stopwatch
photo browser
pac-man
bounce tales
mobichess
worms world party (my favorite)
marble maze
web
search
profile scheduler
fake messages
key lock clock
messaging
y browser
photos (default one)
FM transmitter
radio
podcasting
contacts
advanced call manager
total recall (biggest ram sucker)
music player
google app
quick mark
phonet info
nimbuzz
rotate me
screenshot
green phone
msdict
xplore
sports tracker
and then the forced close
PS: the number of app[s depend upon what all aps you are opening? if i open heavyweights like bolt, opera, and the biggest ram sucker of em all - skyfire (sucks 15MB of ram, i never used it after the first time) then the number is much less.
so you see the trick :P
regards,
soldier
Different apps will eat different amounts of RAM (which will also vary depending on what the app is doing), so saying OS A can run X amount of random apps while OS B only manages Y random apps doesn't really say too much about how well the different systems multitask from a purely technical point of view.
However, I do find it interesting from an end-user point of view. According to the original Palm Pre Plus video, the vanilla Palm Pre (which has 256mb RAM) bailed after 13 apps whereas various old-ish Symbian phones seem to be managing around 30 apps. So, regardless of what's under the hood, as far as the user is concerned they can do more stuff simultaneously on older, cheaper phones. Neat! 😊
But symbian devices doesn't have ripple effects when you touch the screen. Unless you press really hard. hehe. I saw a pre in real life today. It was really sexy. Much more so than i would have though from pictures. Made me want one.
I have tested this morning,I can run 44 applications on my Nokia N79.