14 DAY TRIAL // The Samsung Galaxy Note 5 and Galaxy S6 edge+ have barely been announced and now some units are making their way into the hands of testers, who are discovering some interesting aspects about the phones.
If you have been following the news, you should know that the two phablets are the first from the Sammy garden to don 4GB of RAM, so what we’re about to tell you doesn’t technically make sense.
The folks at the Android Police have noticed that the two phones are aggressively shutting down background tasks. Which means that, when it is time to come back to an app, it will have to load again instead of just quickly re-awaking from a state of non-activity.
Samsung had had issued with killing background tasks before, but all that was blamed on skimpy RAM and the inability to cope with the big demands of the TouchWiz interface. But with 4GB of RAM on board the Galaxy Note 5 and Galaxy S6 edge+, we expected things to be different, didn’t we?
Was Samsung hoping to save power?
As demonstrated in the video below, the Galaxy S6 edge+ is much slower at resuming apps than the Nexus 6, which was launched last year. The same behavior is visible on the Note 5.
So what is the reason a newer phone is outperformed in pulling up background tasks by an older device with slower RAM, processor and storage? At this point, the explanation is pretty unclear. It is speculated that Samsung might have tried to embed some sort of feature in order to save power. But the result is that apps have to be started from scratch every single time the user wants to use a certain application.
Instead of pulling these apps from memory, the process utilized by Samsung ends up using a lot more CPU cycles, so any power saved by removing the apps from memory will likely be nullified in the end. So the whole idea just doesn’t make sense. Samsung has yet to comment on the matter, but when it does, we’re hopeful the situation will be clarified for our peace of mind.
