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I bought a SIM locked ZTE v790 in Egypt. It tells me that it has 181MB of RAM, but it supposed to be 512MB.

Is there a way to check how much RAM my device physically has before deciding to get it replaced?

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Can you post a screenshot of your RAM. 181MB usable for a 512MB RAM device is way too low. Download Antutu Benchmark and check your Device Info again for the actual usable memory. – forums Feb 26 at 1:13
here is some screenshots mediafire.com/… thanks for editing – Mohamed Magdy Feb 26 at 3:14
This is like fraud, a device with 512MB ram should have 300MB+ usable RAM like my Xperia Play. Most likely your unit is fitted with only 256MB RAM because I looked at the internet with others having 270MB RAM usable of the same ZTE v790 model. Did you just recently bought your phone? you should ask for a replacement. – forums Feb 26 at 3:37

3 Answers

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The thing that many users do not understand (partly because vendors choose to advertise total RAM chip size) is that the physical memory chip capacity is shared between different parts of the SoC - namely Application Processor and Baseband Processor. So the amount of memory available to your applications is what's left from the original 512Mb after modem, then Android itself and preloaded system apps get their share. You can not judge the user experience by this amount anyway. ICS has better memory management but reports lesser amount of available memory than GB on the same hardware.

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but it supposed to be more than 181 mb ! like other phones ? mediafire.com/view/?6kqar6p9b19n2ax – Mohamed Magdy Feb 26 at 10:01
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I just found out there are actually 2 versions of the ZTE v790

The 512MB RAM International version that is posted in GSMArena

And the lower cost 256MB RAM version mostly sold to carriers

If you believe you have been given the wrong unit, you should ask for a replacement from your carrier or from the store that you bought it.

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i bought it as The 512MB RAM International version >>i will try to replace it but how Antutu Benchmark show it as 338 mb ram once ?? mediafire.com/view/?386gklhmkj7o7qs and other time 275 mb mediafire.com/view/?dzs34v9m04z24o3 – Mohamed Magdy Feb 26 at 10:05
That is just the performance score of your RAM. It has nothing to do about actual RAM capacity. Open the Info tab and slide to System Info to check your actual RAM size, and post the screenshot if you can. – forums Feb 26 at 23:50
No doubt you have the 256MB version. Even my sister's galaxy Y lists 270MB RAM out of 384MB. Better get it replaced. – forums Feb 27 at 5:59
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You could simply use a terminal emulator (e.g. Android Terminal Emulator) and run the command free

$ free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers
Mem:        487344     472504      14840          0       8348
-/+ buffers/cache:     464156      23188

This example is taken from my Motorola Milestone 2, which is supposed to have 512MB RAM. Check with Alex's answer what might make the difference here: My output shows 476MB total RAM. Using above command at least you can know for sure how much RAM you've got to work with.

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free not found :( – Mohamed Magdy Feb 26 at 10:07
Urgs... Either your manufacturer/ROM creator completely forgot to include the binary, or it's simply not in the PATH. You might try it with different paths, e.g. /system/xbin/free. Some filemanagers might permit you to browse for it, or you can check different locations from within the terminal app. – Izzy Feb 26 at 10:49

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