whats the point of having 3 GB of RAM when samsung cant even get the smoothness of its UI right .

fail

Yes it is using android, but it requires much more than just slapping a powerful soc onto a flagship device, something neither HTC or Samsung has done.

That said, I do agree with you that that lag can be done away with a sheer amount of dedication, it just requires much more effort and we all know effort = higher costs.

Since you give a specific example I will give you a specific answer.

S3 and note2 have the same tw version. There is some occasional lag on s3 but nothing major. Note 2 has no lag.

S4 has reported lags but you're not going to die from it right? Note3 is expected to do away with those issues.

yeah thats true.

i personally think that nowadays deciding on buying an android device with respect to pure hardware performance is just too main stream.

its not just the performance ,  UI plays an important role .

without smooth UI..  whatever highest end performance put into the phone.  the results is still going to be sucks

yeah thats true..

what i meant was if you want to buy an android device. you would choose a smooth UI/phone or a bit laggy UI/phone out of the box?

To me, screw the stock ui. I look at specs. I don't know how to use TW as it only lasts 5 mins after a reset or even when I get a new device. I have 5 androids and they are all running Nova. I do not remember how each different devices' stock ui looks like or behaves.

Exactly! That why I said start from S III, Galaxy series is experiment product from Samsung.

S III lagging due to 1GB RAM is not enough for that time Touchwiz. Then Note II solve it by changing to 2GB.

Now S4 lagging or not stable possible due to 2GB RAM no longer enough for current more features and heavy Touchwiz. And then Note 3 is given user 3GB RAM which high possible eliminates the issues.

note 4 = 4GB ram...

agree on this. nth much different for me between stock android and TW UI. but on Sense, i'm quite confused on it when i play with my fren HTC One. about non-smoothness/laggy, i muz say i never came across this on my Note 2, or juz my eyes aint superman enough to detect.

In the end, its a rectangular with curve corner device to communicate with other ppl......

More RAM actually affected the overall smoothness.

S III lagging main issue due to it not enough RAM, and keep closing background task to let the phone still work in proper, and badly it can even close the main thing - touchwiz launcher.

When RAM is too little to handle everything, how you tweak also useless. Those custom ROM can run more proper as basically most is trim down the whole ROM thus less things run in background, this in-fact is not the real solution. If buy a phone, I want it fully utilize whatever given by the manufacturer, not a trim down edition.

Thus, adding more RAM in-fact is the better way.

it comes to a question, do we really need 3gb RAM? is it just a waste of resources? for user, having more is always good.. but for manufacturer, being smart, being conservative while it still can.. how if next flagship come with 5gb RAM, do we need that much? for me, 1gb RAM boooo.. but 3gb, i don't mind, because 2gb is still abundant…So far i never been in a situation that my 2gb RAM is fully utilized, so why 3gb? just for the sake of fancy spec sheet? its like a Proton Wira with big spoiler, does it really need that?   but anyway i'm dunno engineering stuffs, maybe the current/incoming Android needed 3gb RAM. or maybe TW is so heavy that it needed 3gb RAM while other UI running fine on 2gb..

Actually example for myself, I know the smoothness always is Nexus series phone due to it pure Android.

But I never like Nexus, why? Simple, pure android features is really pure, quite empty actually as destEX said, Nexus phone never fulfill my needs.

I prefer more features phone.

the bolded part is not quite true. ANd there is more that goes into a good custom rom (keyword good) than just shaving things off. There is actual optimisations being done. the simplest one i can think of is partitioning more ram for the UI usage.

the program again, is not enough ram. Lets take Note 2 for example. 2GB.

Out of 2GBram, how much ram is being used by TW UI? not 2GB. a fraction of that. So how is increasing the pool of available ram to 3GB gonna change anything? Its got to go down to the TW UI framework itself. You dont need the extra 1GB to become 3GB to increase smoothness. WHat you need to do is allocate more of the 2GB pool into the TW UI for example, but even then, by right, u shouldnt need to do that because to do it means that the UI has memory leak in the first place. :/

when your S3 lags, the TW UI, go to your ram, and see where is the pool of ram being assigned to. Then you can get a better picture of why your device is lagging.

so yea. Optimisation is the keyword

the rest of your post is more or less spot on

We are holding computers, not phones anymore.  More RAM is ALWAYS a good thing to reduce paging. Why are in memory accelerators all the rage in enterprise database and application software??

More RAM lets you do more. Do not ever think you are using a phone to browse. It is a computer that uses your phone radio as a modem only.

is it just me or other will think of this... since ram is designed long time ago because processor read at ram faster than read at spinning harddisk (pc era)....

since nowadays all mobile phones all using flashed based chip storage, why they dont skip all over the ram thing, directly read at the storage chips, does it makes sense?

Instead of
processor (SoC, 1.7gHz) <> ram (2gb) <> storage (8/16/32gb)

how about
processor (SoC, 1.3 gHz) <> flashed based ram/storage (8/16/32gb)

then no more lag things happens lor... samsung is hardware maker, i root on then to do this, or maybe qualcomm or apple or intel or nvidia or amd can do this also...

Omg this thread will bust 2500 in the next few hours... I will only be home around 11pm.

Hang in there guys and gals.

no, everyone knows iphone doesn't lag, it is a godlike phone, it doesn't crash too.

So many people complained about the lagginess of this and that, yet, I bet those who said something like this are still using crappy laptop/desktop at home without even tweaking it.

*Iphone fans*