what for and why do OMNIA 2 reserved 50% of it RAM?

[Guest damienloh]

This situation is not unique to WM6.5. My Omnia II is using WM6.1 ROM IH3 (previously IG1).

If I remove all the shortcuts at the startup folder, the free RAM is about 80MB (Touchwiz disabled).

With the startup programs, the free RAM is about 60MB.

I notice some strange behaviour on the RAM usage, for example after surfing a few pages of full website,

the free RAM will drop to like 20+MB but Memmaid show that Opera Mobile 9.5 only take up about 5MB of RAM.

It seems that a lot of memory used for something else. Resource paging?

When Opera Mobile close, the free RAM restore to about 50MB.

Edited December 1, 2009 by damienloh

[Guest dothan]

Other devices simply have the apps of the phone running in regular memory. In Samsung's case, the "reserved memory" is COMPLETELY unusable and inaccessible to Windows Mobile OS itself. That is, Windows Mobile cannot even SEE this RAM that Samsung "reserved". Doing more checking, this means it is NOT the WinMo cache or filesystem cache or anything like that.

This appears to be memory that is actually divided off from normal operational memory BEFORE Windows Mobile OS is actually loaded!!! So that means WinMo/apps/us have no ability to control this whatsoever.

Considering this, I highly doubt it is memory that has any use by WinMo or any Samsung WinMo applications, since it is being controlled outside of the OS itself.

You are totally right, the reserved memory is totally not visible to WinMo 6.1 or 6.5. Therefore, we have reported actual memory is 140MB. In fact, Samsung plays a trick to fool us total RAM is 256MB on the Setting->Memory Setting->Program RAM! The worst thing is, Samsung applications uses the remaining 140MB after bootup. Something is fishy here...

In my past experience with HP Ipaq 1910 (the very first slimmest Ipaq released), partial of Pocket PC 2002 (prior to WinMo) have to transferred to RAM during bootup due to the NAND flash rom. Files located in NAND flash rom are not executable directly, they got to transfer to RAM first. So after the Ipaq booted up, you get lesser visible RAM to Pocket PC 2002.

The reason why use NAND flash rom?? Cost is the main reason!

This is my wild guess on why we have more than 100MB pre-occupied and not visible to WinMo at all. I think we need Samsung to explain on this issue clearly.

[Guest guy.user]

As far as I know the i9x0 does not have this problem, but the B7610 Omnia Pro does. I wonder if the B7300 does as well?

I believe part of the ram is reserved on my i900 as well....

[Guest guy.user]

Can't be the cube, on my omnia pro the same amount of ram is reserved,

I cant imagine that the reserved 120mb are useful for anything, what was Samsung thinking when doing this :D ???

I mean samsung makes the best hardware (AMOLED, and so on) 

but in terms of software they should invest more because the best hardware is nothing without good software.

Exactly...if we can combine Samsung's hardware & HTC's software, it will almost make a perfect device....

[Guest nap_rz]

something is really fishy here

we need to get attention from samsung and reviewers..... anyone can help us by contacting reviewers like gsmarena or such? because most if not all reviews I've seen about this phone as well as it's brothers (omnia pro/lite/whatever) never mentioned this problems, they were satisfied with the performance; yet as we together experienced, this is serious problems that practically nullified one of the major point why we bought this phone.

[Guest ray1234]

In my past experience with HP Ipaq 1910 (the very first slimmest Ipaq released), partial of Pocket PC 2002 (prior to WinMo) have to transferred to RAM during bootup due to the NAND flash rom. Files located in NAND flash rom are not executable directly, they got to transfer to RAM first. So after the Ipaq booted up, you get lesser visible RAM to Pocket PC 2002.

The reason why use NAND flash rom?? Cost is the main reason!

This is my wild guess on why we have more than 100MB pre-occupied and not visible to WinMo at all. I think we need Samsung to explain on this issue clearly.

You cannot compare PPC2002 against WM6.1/6.5, they are 2 different systems. In the days of PPC2002, ROM is just used to store things only (those are not EPROM anyway, so cannot even re-flash), programs cannot execute in ROM, that's why on cold booting the stuff in ROM is still transferred back to RAM. It's only starting from WM5 that ROM is used to run programs.

The reserved rom doesn't mean it can't be used by the system, pagepool is a good example. Pagepool reserves the ram which is outside the 'seen' 140MB but the pagepool is in fact used by WM system for cache. My guess is a lot of the reserve ram goes to speed up the Touchwiz and Cube interface, which is completely useless to us who don't use the Touchwiz/Cube interface. I'm waiting for someone to cook a rom without the Touchwiz and Cube.

[Guest dothan]

You cannot compare PPC2002 against WM6.1/6.5, they are 2 different systems. In the days of PPC2002, ROM is just used to store things only (those are not EPROM anyway, so cannot even re-flash), programs cannot execute in ROM, that's why on cold booting the stuff in ROM is still transferred back to RAM. It's only starting from WM5 that ROM is used to run programs.

The reserved rom doesn't mean it can't be used by the system, pagepool is a good example. Pagepool reserves the ram which is outside the 'seen' 140MB but the pagepool is in fact used by WM system for cache. My guess is a lot of the reserve ram goes to speed up the Touchwiz and Cube interface, which is completely useless to us who don't use the Touchwiz/Cube interface. I'm waiting for someone to cook a rom without the Touchwiz and Cube.

Well, I am not comparing PPC2002 against WinMo. In fact, many high end PPC2002 models come with NAND flash where you are allowed to execute directly on it. And NOR flash is not EEPROM and can be flashed with upgrade ROMs. You can see the are linux ROMs for flashing 1910 on handhelds.org.

I had gone through WinMo team blog and found this... http://blogs.msdn.com/windowsmobile/archiv.../17/494177.aspx

I think ROM cooker should remove the Touch Wiz and reduce the pagepool significantly. This phone is still a good WM phone as the processor is speedy.

Edited December 1, 2009 by dothan

[Guest arun gupta]

something is really fishy here

we need to get attention from samsung and reviewers..... anyone can help us by contacting reviewers like gsmarena or such? because most if not all reviews I've seen about this phone as well as it's brothers (omnia pro/lite/whatever) never mentioned this problems, they were satisfied with the performance; yet as we together experienced, this is serious problems that practically nullified one of the major point why we bought this phone.

yes brother.. we needed to be told of this proble.. i think the reviewers website have samsung as their sponsers so probably thy cannot say negative.

now our money is at stake, and our fellow programmers can help us by giving a clean rom, with a better memory management..

;-)

[Guest nap_rz]

one more thing

touchwiz is very heavy so I can't believe if it is actually received benefit from the reserved RAM

the cube on the other hand seem so fluid, yet I also can't believe such simple 3D interface need or actually received benefit from 100MB of RAM......the size of the cube is probably only 400x400x400 or something which should not need 100MB of memory.

and still no word from samsung...

is there actually someone out there who building clean ROM for O2 now?

[Guest dothan]

Another thing we have to bear in mind is the double buffering technique for smooth divx playback...

Do you know the ScreenCapture.exe running as a process in our O2? Once you terminate it, your task switcher no longer able to display the correct app screenshot. To me, it's a waste of resource, I get rid with it and replace with standard task manager. Who wants a fancy task switcher which does not perform like Aero in Vista/Win7? :D

[Guest mccmjoon76]

finally, someone with the same feeling about this....

as far as I can tell, disabling touchwiz will only give u about 55MB of RAM, still way too few for most multitasking...

what can we hope is to somehow REMOVE the whole touchwiz from the phone, which I fear only can be done with custom/cooked ROM which make the factory guarantee void; however considering this is a high end phone and we paid a premium price for this phone, and expected to get the most from it's hardware then it could be worth it.

as for downgrading to wm6.1, I don't think us who already experience 6.5 will want to do so....especially on a phone without in-house stylus...and as matter of fact, I don't know how to downgrade my phone -which is also voiding my guarantee (not so sure about this), downgrade + voiding guarantee = no no for me ;) -.

Guys, i'm using my omnia 2 for 1 month now. My omnia come with WM 6.1 affer i upgrade to WM 6.5 i face the some problem !(Low RAM memory). So i downgrade to WM 6.1 at Samsung care center wow. i got back 70 mb of RAM memory after install spb shell 3.5.1. The phone is great ,fast :D  no problem with running 4-5 apps. Guys just downgrade to 6.1.U will live it ! :(

[Guest johnchan]

Another thing we have to bear in mind is the double buffering technique for smooth divx playback...

Do you know the ScreenCapture.exe running as a process in our O2? Once you terminate it, your task switcher no longer able to display the correct app screenshot. To me, it's a waste of resource, I get rid with it and replace with standard task manager. Who wants a fancy task switcher which does not perform like Aero in Vista/Win7? :D

I just want to say, the ScreenCapture.exe just captures the screen when a program starts, and then saves it so that when you use the "visual" taskmanager, it can show a mini-screen of that program.

However, again, I want to stress that ALL of Samsung's programs use the FREE AVAILABLE memory, NOT the reserved memory. That is why Main Menu, Media Player, Camera, and everything else are all using the MAIN FREE RAM, and nothing to do with the reserved section.

I could understand if Samsung wanted to devote/reserve 100Mb guaranteed for their own programs, so they know it wont compete with other user-installed programs for RAM. That's okay. But they are not. In fact, I've experienced that the Camera won't work and said it needed 10MB RAM to start.

As for reviewers, I bet they only tested things 1-by-1. Test Media Player, quit. Test Camera, quit. Test Messanging, quit. They never tried to run more than 1 thing at a time. So of course even if the Free RAM is only 20Mb they won't have any problem.

The annoying thing is, we are no closer to solving this mystery now. Dammit. And I've done more testing... Windows Mobile really cannot see this memory at all!!!

[Guest miroalex]

i guess it is not mystery or hardware fault or bla bla bla,

SAMSUNG MAKE US FOOL... this device doesn't contain 256mb ram that's why we can't see it !! if something exist you can show and you can see it but about 256mb ram it is only written in reviews that much you can't show it practically either by hardware or software .... you can't show me that really samsung omnia 2 has 256mb ram and 120mb of it, is resereved because it doesn't exist at all ...

I'm quite disappointed though i have omnia i900 but i was planning to have omnia 2 near future but now this is the end!

the last thing or last hope is the SAMSUNG company explanation about this problem ...

[Guest nap_rz]

I just want to say, the ScreenCapture.exe just captures the screen when a program starts, and then saves it so that when you use the "visual" taskmanager, it can show a mini-screen of that program.

However, again, I want to stress that ALL of Samsung's programs use the FREE AVAILABLE memory, NOT the reserved memory. That is why Main Menu, Media Player, Camera, and everything else are all using the MAIN FREE RAM, and nothing to do with the reserved section.

I could understand if Samsung wanted to devote/reserve 100Mb guaranteed for their own programs, so they know it wont compete with other user-installed programs for RAM. That's okay. But they are not. In fact, I've experienced that the Camera won't work and said it needed 10MB RAM to start.

As for reviewers, I bet they only tested things 1-by-1. Test Media Player, quit. Test Camera, quit. Test Messanging, quit. They never tried to run more than 1 thing at a time. So of course even if the Free RAM is only 20Mb they won't have any problem.

The annoying thing is, we are no closer to solving this mystery now. Dammit. And I've done more testing... Windows Mobile really cannot see this memory at all!!!

but I think these reviewers are not that amateur or stupid.

[Guest Ganhiru]

...

SAMSUNG MAKE US FOOL... this device doesn't contain 256mb ram that's why we can't see it !! if something exist you can show and you can see it but about 256mb ram it is only written in reviews that much you can't show it practically either by hardware or software .... you can't show me that really samsung omnia 2 has 256mb ram and 120mb of it, is resereved because it doesn't exist at all ...

...

The i8000 does have 265MB of RAM this is confirmed by pll that opened the device, Plus SAMSUNG would have a heck of a lawsuit if it were true.

Plus how else can different Rom versions have different amounts of total RAM.

I understand that these issues make you want to avoid the O2, but don't go posting lies like that.

[Guest gchris7]

Same thing happens on HTC HD2. It is supposed to have 448 MB ram but windows only shows 336mb. About the same amount of ram (~115mb) as our O2, is hidden for some reason.

[Guest La Traviata]

How disappointing. I have the Omnia i900 and was holding off getting the O2 until it was released with WM 6.5 as standard, but I see little point in upgrading now until this RAM issue is solved (especially if it also affects other WM 6.5 devices). In fact, with WM 7 already announced, I may just wait for that and see what phones are around then (of course, such a major upgrade could invite even bigger problems...).

[Guest Breit]

How disappointing. I have the Omnia i900 and was holding off getting the O2 until it was released with WM 6.5 as standard, but I see little point in upgrading now until this RAM issue is solved (especially if it also affects other WM 6.5 devices). In fact, with WM 7 already announced, I may just wait for that and see what phones are around then (of course, such a major upgrade could invite even bigger problems...).

i think there is no issue, besides the fact that samsung only spend 256mb of ram and not 512mb. the omnia 2 is a device with a dedicated 3d graphics engine, which means somewhere in the ram must be a part reserved for video ram (unlike the i900, which does not have a dedicated 3d engine). then we have to reserve a few frame buffers (i bet there are 2 or 3 of it holding the screen contens, which is 768k each on 16bit color depth). then we have the aforementioned page pool where nobody really know how large that is. then we need some ram reserved for the radio part (phone, wifi, bluetooth) - data buffers and stuff. at the end we also need some dma buffers and maybe some space reserved for bootloaders etc. maybe someone can come up with benchmarks and stuff to measure how large each reserved part must be and then we might got an idea on the purpose of the reserved memory, but one thing is for sure: it really is not helpful to blame samsung for advertising their product false.

edit:

just forgot: we have a nice camera on the omnia 2 which is capable of recording video at 720x480 in mpeg-4! that means we need quite a few bits to store temporary data for the encoder to work and i bet this is not included in the 10mb the camera app itself needs.

Edited December 1, 2009 by Breit

[Guest Meen]

IMO, O2 take ~64MB of RAM for Video Memory, ~16MB for Camera buffer and ~38MB Page pool+etc so 64+16+38 = 118MB which is quite reasonable.

Compare to O1 -> 128MB RAM is ~90MB usable so it mean about 38MB is reserved for Page pool+etc

[Guest nap_rz]

i think there is no issue, besides the fact that samsung only spend 256mb of ram and not 512mb. the omnia 2 is a device with a dedicated 3d graphics engine, which means somewhere in the ram must be a part reserved for video ram (unlike the i900, which does not have a dedicated 3d engine). then we have to reserve a few frame buffers (i bet there are 2 or 3 of it holding the screen contens, which is 768k each on 16bit color depth). then we have the aforementioned page pool where nobody really know how large that is. then we need some ram reserved for the radio part (phone, wifi, bluetooth) - data buffers and stuff. at the end we also need some dma buffers and maybe some space reserved for bootloaders etc. maybe someone can come up with benchmarks and stuff to measure how large each reserved part must be and then we might got an idea on the purpose of the reserved memory, but one thing is for sure: it really is not helpful to blame samsung for advertising their product false.

edit:

just forgot: we have a nice camera on the omnia 2 which is capable of recording video at 720x480 in mpeg-4! that means we need quite a few bits to store temporary data for the encoder to work and i bet this is not included in the 10mb the camera app itself needs.

sorry, it sound like quite nonsense actually...

Xperia X1 also have a dedicated graphics engine, almost the same resolution video recording; yet... Xperia could have 140+MB of FREE RAM after startup if you wipe all the panels.

btw somebody above mentioned HD2 also have this sort of missing RAM? any proof?

[Guest La Traviata]

i think there is no issue, besides the fact that samsung only spend 256mb of ram and not 512mb. the omnia 2 is a device with a dedicated 3d graphics engine, which means somewhere in the ram must be a part reserved for video ram (unlike the i900, which does not have a dedicated 3d engine). then we have to reserve a few frame buffers (i bet there are 2 or 3 of it holding the screen contens, which is 768k each on 16bit color depth). then we have the aforementioned page pool where nobody really know how large that is. then we need some ram reserved for the radio part (phone, wifi, bluetooth) - data buffers and stuff. at the end we also need some dma buffers and maybe some space reserved for bootloaders etc. maybe someone can come up with benchmarks and stuff to measure how large each reserved part must be and then we might got an idea on the purpose of the reserved memory, but one thing is for sure: it really is not helpful to blame samsung for advertising their product false.

On my i900 I have no problem with programmes closing due to RAM runnign low, however from the complaints from O2 users on this forum I gather that this is happening on O2 running WM 6.5. That is an issue for me. So right now the option would be to either get O2 with WM 6.1, as this only seems to happen on WM 6.5, which seems a bit pointless though with WM 7 around the corner, or wait for WM 6.5 to become more usable. Or wait for WM 7 altogether.

BTW, I have not blamed Samsung for advertising their product falsely, so please do not quote me on this.

Edited December 1, 2009 by La Traviata

[Guest gchris7]

btw somebody above mentioned HD2 also have this sort of missing RAM? any proof?

I read it on the htc forums.

Here

[Guest Breit]

sorry, it sound like quite nonsense actually...

Xperia X1 also have a dedicated graphics engine, almost the same resolution video recording; yet... Xperia could have 140+MB of FREE RAM after startup if you wipe all the panels.

btw somebody above mentioned HD2 also have this sort of missing RAM? any proof?

i didn't say that samsungs decision to reserve so much ram is clever, but nevertheless they did as we all know. maybe se did not reserve such a big chunk on the x1 for lets say the 3d-engine, but thats just guessing. i think i'll leave this to the guys who exactly know the specs of the different devices and keep my phone rebooted every 2 days. 8)

BTW, I have not blamed Samsung for advertising their product falsely, so please do not quote me on this.

sorry, my fault. that one was a answer to what miroalex posted. :D

[Guest miroalex]

The i8000 does have 265MB of RAM this is confirmed by pll that opened the device, Plus SAMSUNG would have a heck of a lawsuit if it were true.

Plus how else can different Rom versions have different amounts of total RAM.

I understand that these issues make you want to avoid the O2, but don't go posting lies like that.

the things that i posted is not lie i just got angry and express my self, i didn't write that i am quite sure that it doesn't have 256mb and i confirm it, i just said that i didn't see any fact either hardware and software that shows o2 has 256mb and now your answer said me that it is completely true that o2 has 256mb and i will say ok let's see what we can do(i hope that i can help and have some solution but i haven't :D )

[Guest skoda60]

I have freshed backed to 6.1 IH5. Widget disabled,used spb mobile shell,s2u2,GMXT,pocket e-sword etc. By disabled the dialer. I had 83mb. Can run many program concurrently and stable. But when RAM below 50mb, it will started to closing down program.Another failure from Microsoft like vista on PC.