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Now, a phone with 6GB of RAM. But why the heck would you want one?

In the race to stand out from the pack, phone manufacturers are packing ever-beefier features into their phones: Vivo is the latest, with their XPlay 5 announced to have 6GB of RAM.

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Phone manufacturers today are fighting a torrid battle. With improvements in manufacturing technologies and logistics, the ability to mass produce reasonably good devices at staggering volumes has led to an unprecedented situation these past few years: from a time when there were literally just a handful of Tier 1 smartphones brands in the market, we now have a reality where new brands--each with a latest and greatest feature or rationality-defying price level--are mushrooming up almost weekly.

And to stay competitive, brands are exploring all manner of approaches to try and make their devices stand out from the pack. From exotic materials used to craft the bodies of phones, to batteries boasting multi-day capacities, to ‘DSLR-level’ photographic capabilities, beefy specs are almost a given these days.

The latest, though, is a phone with a surprisingly large amount of RAM in it--6GB, actually. The Vivo XPlay 5 takes the crown of being the first phone in the world to pack more RAM that even the computer it may be sitting next to.

So the first question is: why would I need 6GB of RAM in my phone. And it’s a good question, considering most people’s desktops or laptops generally include 4GB of RAM, with only the high-end versions sporting 6GB and 8GB of memory. Also, shouldn’t a mobile operating system be more efficient on resources, given that it is after all a mobile device?

To answer this question, let’s look at a similar recent development--that of mobile phone screen resolutions getting increasingly higher. From a time when a typical 5.5-inch phone had a resolution of 720x1280 to a reality where flagship phones today like the Sony Xperia Z5 Premium has a 4K screen, it all seemed ludicrous at the time. After all, with the human eye being incapable of even discerning all of that resolution--even up close--many scoffed at phones having screens with such extreme pixel densities.

Then came the phone-based VR revolution. With phones now being slotted into the likes of a Google Cardboard or a Gear VR system, these phone screens were now magnified and presented to the wearer’s eyes--those high pixel densities finally made sense.

But when it comes to RAM, the situation isn’t quite so clear cut as yet. Nobody is going to be running massive databases on their phones right? Really, the only apps that could ever tap into the added memory would be the likes of photo and video editors. Each time a phone’s high-resolution photo or 4K video is loaded up into a phone-based editing app, it would need a fair amount of memory as these files are processed with filters or edited or cropped. But really, even 6GB of overkill. At least for now.

The only reality I see 6GB of RAM becoming necessary in a phone is one where the phone itself powers a larger computing experience--the kind that Microsoft is doing with Continuum and their 950 and 950XL phones. If ever consumers warm up to the idea of having their phone drive a large-screen keyboard enabled computing experience, the added memory would undoubtedly go a long way in facilitating a smooth user experience. But this is a computing scenario as yet unproven in terms of public acceptance.

So for now, if you’re actually considering going in for a smartphone with 6GB of RAM, do it only for one reason: because you can.

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