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OPPO Find X to get 10GB RAM version, spotted at TENAA
There have been rumors of a 10GB RAM smartphone in development for a while now. Vivo's yet unreleased Xplay7 was rumored to come with 10GB RAM and the ASUS ROG Phone was also supposed to come with 10GB of RAM. It appears OPPO will be the first to launch a 10GB RAM phone judging by an updated TENAA listing of the Find X.
The Find X originally comes with 8GB of RAM and 128GB or 256GB of storage but Chinese leaker @UniverseIce shared a photo of an updated listing that shows the Find X will get a new 10GB RAM + 256GB ROM model.
We were able to confirm that the leak is genuine as the full TENAA specs listing for the Find X (PAFM00 model) now has a 10GB RAM variant. The update to the listing was made yesterday. The rest of the specs will remain the same as the other variant.
TENAA is China's phone regulatory body.
Also at The Verge, Engadget, Fossbytes, and BGR.
Related: Samsung Announces 12Gb LPDDR4 DRAM, Could Enable Smartphones With 6 GB of RAM
Samsung Announces 8 GB DRAM Package for Mobile Devices
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Saturday September 29 2018, @02:35AM (4 children)
"Who the fark cares?".
A) Does it do what I want quickly? Can I afford it? If yes, buy.
B) Does it make up for a RAM shortfall via a faster CPU/modem, or vice versa? Don't care, go to A.
Of course I'm against DEI. Donald, Eric, and Ivanka.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 29 2018, @02:43AM (3 children)
So, I doubt it.
Unless you think "Programmable" applies to "Constrained to the ideas of corporation-controlled 20-something-year-old man children".
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Subsentient on Saturday September 29 2018, @05:27AM (2 children)
Agreed, the thing I absolutely hate about smartphones is how it's virtually impossible to run anything but some flavor of android on 99% of them. Then there's a very sizable portion that not only will only run the stock ROM, but won't give you root access. Evil. Android has twisted Linux into something hideous that spits in the face of everything Linux represents.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 29 2018, @11:37AM (1 child)
Kind of like what microsoft did to DOS. Look at windows today.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 29 2018, @03:25PM
I'd rather look inside the Ark of the Covenant.
(Score: 3, Touché) by jasassin on Saturday September 29 2018, @03:21AM (13 children)
That's a whole lot of ROM. WTF am I gonna do with 256GB of ROM?
???
jasassin@gmail.com GPG Key ID: 0xE6462C68A9A3DB5A
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday September 29 2018, @04:02AM (4 children)
Well, if you're not filling your phone up with pirated Blu-rays, I'd imagine that storage would be used for apps and games.
Think back to the good ol' days of the failed Ubuntu Edge [wikipedia.org] concept phone. That was intended to be a PC replacement, and would have had 128 GB of storage. If you have the capability to use a docked phone as a desktop, you might be able to use all that space.
On the game front, as lame as playing on such a small screen could be, you could do the same docking thing, or use it with something along the lines of Gear VR for VR games or 360-degree videos.
You could simply use the phone like you would use a USB flash drive. I typically plug my phone into my laptop to charge it anyway.
It's not like 256 GB costs so much for the smartphone manufacturer. A 256 GB microSD might cost you around $65 [camelcamelcamel.com].
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 29 2018, @04:12AM (2 children)
Oh goody, apps and games in ROM, so you're stuck with them forever. Permanent, non-bugfix-replaceable, undeletable Facebook and Candy Crush.
ROM wouldn't do you a lick of good for storing copies of videos. It's read only. It contains stuff that's always present, that you can never delete, ever, without taking a brick to the device. Think Apple forcing U2 on everybody, only the phones come from the factory with the album preloaded and, because it's in ROM, you can never delete it.
(Score: 2) by toddestan on Saturday September 29 2018, @06:49PM (1 child)
I'm pretty sure when they say "ROM" they really mean "flash".
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Pino P on Sunday September 30 2018, @12:09AM
An Android phone's flash memory often contains gigabytes of (possibly abusive) F2P games and trialware. And the partition they're in is marked as read-only so that they remain available even after a factory reset. If an application gets updated, the user ends up with two copies: the older version in the read-only partition and the newer version downloaded from Google Play in the normal partition.
(Score: 2) by EvilSS on Saturday September 29 2018, @04:14AM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 29 2018, @04:04AM (2 children)
I've wondered that when I've seen phones advertising how much ROM they have. That's a whole lot of unremovable crapware.
Who gives a flying duck how much ROM a phone has? RAM, storage & expandability, screen size & resolution, camera characteristics: those are the kinds of things people are interested in. "Now with Facebook in ROM" is not a selling feature.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday September 29 2018, @04:17AM (1 child)
Ehhh, I'm pretty sure that was just a mistake in the article. Or had you already figured that out?
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 29 2018, @06:29PM
Probably not a mistake in TFA, though you would expect a competent reporter to pick up on the error. I've looked up a few phones as a consideration for my next. A number of them highlight having large quantities of ROM without mentioning how much storage they have.
More likely is that some marketing drone has a handbook of computer buzzwords from the '80s or early '90s and noticed that RAM and ROM were often used together, so in their minds ROM equates to hard drive (or, more generally, storage). Regardless of the reason, if a company's marketing people are too dumb to distinguish ROM from storage, they're not getting my money.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday September 29 2018, @04:17AM (4 children)
All of it music, all from CDs that I own.
I readily agree that not everyone is so heavily into music, but some are.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 29 2018, @09:09AM (3 children)
Say you compress each CD to about 160MB (320kbps mp3s I think): 1563 CDs at 25$ a CD costs you some $40k... Putting aside the storage space issue, I think you've crossed the hobby bridge pass the passion crossroads into the dependency bad neighborhoods area.
"Nanna always said rock was the devils music but I wouldn't listen.
Now, here I am curled up in a street corner, strung out on old Bon Jovi mixtapes.
Nothing but a cardboard box to call a home..."
Will make a good Johnny Cash song.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 29 2018, @06:39PM (2 children)
So your iGadget, with its 256MB, is a very early generation MP3 player?
Your one CD just filled most of your 256MB of Flash. You'll probably want to compress your CD to 64kbps. The sound quality will be crap compared to your preferred 320kbps, but you'll be able to fit several CDs of music onto your iGadget.
It should be pointed out that your iGadget's meager 256 MB of Flash has one major benefit over the Otto phone's 256GB of ROM: your flash storage is rewritable. You can erase and replace the handful of CDs' music. ROMs, unless you have a personal burner, are factory-set. It's worse than when Steve Jobs forced that U2 album on everyone. If Otto puts the album in ROM, you're stuck with it.
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Saturday September 29 2018, @09:59PM (1 child)
There is no goddamn 256 GB of ROM. It's flash storage.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 30 2018, @09:59PM
RTFS. Then RTFA. R-O-M spells "ROM" -- read-only memory - not "flash". If the PR flack/article author insists on referring to the wrong type of storage and the editors neglect to point out an obvious stupid mistake and a commenter goofs up their megs and gigs then it behooves us to make fun of the lot of them. <grin>
You might want to cut back on the caffeine.
(Score: 2) by NewNic on Saturday September 29 2018, @03:25AM (1 child)
It was there, then it wasn't. Now it's back again.
Time problems on the server?
lib·er·tar·i·an·ism ˌlibərˈterēənizəm/ noun: Magical thinking that useful idiots mistake for serious political theory
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday September 29 2018, @04:16AM
But the starship enterprise went to Uranus to wipe out the Klingons.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday September 29 2018, @04:15AM (11 children)
I was the only full-time coder for a company with twelve employees whose peak year during my time there was three million dollars gross.
The most hard drive I had through that time was eighty megabytes, the most RAM I think 16mb.
If I could write three million dollars worth of code with sixteen megabytes in 1992, why can't we _all_ do so in 2018?
There are some legitimate explanations, for example there is a great deal of value to the in-memory databases that 64-bit addressing affords us.
What gets me down is that many of today's most-popular applications are _dramatically_ slower than those of 1992. Shouldn't they be faster? I have a special hatred for {Open,Libre}Office. The time that elapses between my clicking their icon in my Mac's Dock until they're ready to accept user input is just inexcusable.
But let's set that problem aside from now.
Flappy Bird I understand made its author fifty grand PER DAY. That fellow had the right attitude. Surely more of us can come up with money-making yet resource-sparing products.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 29 2018, @04:49AM (4 children)
The modern code is slower because it is cheaper. Today's computers are good enough to deal with the overhead of the OS and standard frameworks. Those who think otherwise are always welcome to code in assembly language, it's supported on most/all platforms. Of course, hundreds of bank forms are coded a bit differently than a pacemaker.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 29 2018, @05:13AM (2 children)
Assembly language? No need since I entered the workforce 23 years ago.
Any simple compiled language will do, like C. Oh, and lay off the dozen framework layers.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday September 29 2018, @08:56AM (1 child)
Not to actually write any, nor to read disassemblies during debugging.
Rather it's to more intuitively understand what their high-level, interpreted code is doing to their CPU and their RAM.
Back in the day, some newbie posted to Usenet a question about how he could write a C program that would execute the chmod(1) command-line program. He was completely unaware that he could just use the chmod() system call.
That kind of newbie lack of insight is today found even among coders with ten or more years experience, because there are a great many who write nothing but Javascript during their entire careers.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 29 2018, @05:22PM
And every single one of those ignorant JS coders is a millionaire, because the techbro industry values young and stupid, just like you do, you old pedophile.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Saturday September 29 2018, @12:37PM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 29 2018, @04:58AM (4 children)
Back in 1992, we were all writing code that was "close" to the computer. By that I mean, while most of us weren't writing machine code, there were few layers of abstraction between the application code and the actual CPU execution layer.
Now there are so many layers upon layers of abstraction -- where abstraction equals "other people's code that we can't operate without yet we have no idea what it's really doing in that black box" -- that must be included/available for any application to work, that applications are relatively huge.
It's also the reason why so few of the recently graduated "programmers" are any good at real troubleshooting, because they really have no idea what the computer is actually doing. They don't program a computer, they send calls to API classes which do all the real work for them. Lets them worry about font size and eliminating skeuomorphism instead of logic or efficiency.
But I'm just a bitter old guy so what do I know?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 29 2018, @05:50AM (1 child)
Indeed, I did look now and then into sources of Qt to figure out why things don't work. Same with Atmel libraries. Found a crashing bug once in the library - without that fix the code would be a dead end.
That's what abundance of CPU speed and memory does to people. They choose the easiest, cheapest solution that can be sold to the equally undemanding customers. But things like high end CAD software or FPS games are coded with utmost respect to available CPU time.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday September 29 2018, @06:07AM
The system works.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday September 29 2018, @08:49AM (1 child)
I must say I often find some things today that are a vast improvement over their decades-ago equivalents:
Instead of artificial woodgrain veneer I usually find real wood. For example growing up my family's dining room table had woodgrain formica, but the table I own myself, that i bought in 1998, it's made of real wood - solid even, no veneer.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 29 2018, @11:42AM
Real wood is too expensive now
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 30 2018, @10:11PM
Over-reliance on abstraction and bloated libraries that rely on bloated libraries that rely on bloated libraries.
In 1992, you cared about optimizing code and reducing footprint size because you knew computers weren't that fast and didn't have a lot of memory or storage. (I remember the time: 16MB was an extravagance for my then-high-end 486/66, adding $1200 to the cost of my computer. 8MB was a lot and 4MB more common.) Today, nobody thinks twice about optimization. Processors are fast and getting faster every year, RAM and storage keeps getting faster and cheaper. Nobody has to take pride in shaving minutes (or hours) of runtime or kilobytes off their code anymore because the bloat will be absorbed by the next generation of hardware. It's quite sad, really.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 30 2018, @04:06AM
no one needs more than 640k.