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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, 2013 at 1:13
  • here is some screenshots mediafire.com/… thanks for editing
    – Mohamed Magdy
    Feb 26, 2013 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, 2013 at 3:37

5 Answers 5

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I know this is an old questions but it comes up first in Google so I thought I would put a simple answer.

Depending on the version of Android:

  • Settings > Applications > Running services
  • or Settings > Apps > Running services
  • or Settings > More > Application Manager > Running (at the top)
  • or Settings > System > Developer Options > Running services

At the bottom you will see RAM, used and free. Add both number together to get total usable RAM for the device. Note that this might be less than the RAM advertised for the phone model, as the system may reserve some of the RAM for itself as explained in other answers.

Cheers

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    Android StackExchange encourages good answers to old questions, there's even a badge for it :)
    – Flimm
    Mar 7, 2016 at 14:41
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    This has become a little more involved since the release of Oreo (v8.0.0.0), you need to enable developer options through Settings > System > About Phone then tapping on Build number until it says you're a developer, then you can find the RAM under Settings > System > Developer options > Memory
    – MrLore
    Aug 8, 2018 at 14:53
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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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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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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, 2013 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, 2013 at 10:49
  • Alternatively, one could install Termux, (See: termux.com), as it comes with it's own coreutils package.
    – oxr463
    Sep 12, 2019 at 18:35
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In Android 8 it is:

  • Settings > System > About phone > Hardware information

This displays RAM size, ROM size, Display resolution and a bunch of other similar parameters.

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