Some Samsung Galaxy owners are getting a free performance upgrade – here's who gets it

RAM Plus gives your phone extra juice to handle tasks

Samsung S21
(Image credit: Shutterstock)

Samsung appears to be rolling out its RAM Plus feature to the Galaxy Z Fold 3 5G, amongst a range of other devices. RAM Plus uses your smartphone's unused storage space as virtual RAM, which can be used to slightly boost performance when using a plethora of apps, etc. The gains may be small, but the feature eases the workload for your struggling device's memory. 

Previously, RAM Plus was exclusive to the Samsung Galaxy A52 5G, which was able to draw upon internal memory to increase the storage capacity of its RAM. Now, Samsung is extending RAM Plus to more of its devices. Alongside the Galaxy Z Fold 3 5G, both mid-range and flagship devices from our pick of the best Samsung phones will benefit from the feature, including the Samsung Galaxy S21 and Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra. 

Samsung will bring RAM Plus to a variety of Galaxy devices, but the Galaxy Z Fold 3, in particular, has already added the RAM-boosting feature to its bag of tricks through a software update. The feature works by enabling the OS to use an extra 4GB of internal storage as virtual memory, so the recently launched Galaxy Z Fold 3 effectively now has 20GB of usable memory to help manage grueling workloads.

To be clear: any improvements from RAM Plus aren't likely to be earth-shattering. SamMobile is quick to note that Android is already typically quite good at avoiding overloading your phone by terminating background apps and processes. This is especially true of Samsung, which tunes the memory-saving process to be even more aggressive.

Ramifications 

Even though you're unlikely to run into any major memory management issues when using selected Samsung handsets from our pick of the best Android phones, it's good to know that a new feature is soon-to-land that adds even more in the way of RAM, with the OS squeezing every last drop of RAM usage to better serve your phone's daily usage across tasks and processes.

On the note of phone usage, though: day-to-day memory usage is unlikely to be heavily impacted by RAM Plus. Users shouldn't expect a sudden and massive uptick in how the device grapples with opening all of your apps at once (something we wouldn't advise under any conditions). But, in the event that your phone does come under strain, rest assured that RAM Plus equips the phone to better deal with these types of scenarios.

You can check if RAM Plus is available on your Galaxy device by opening the Settings app, going into the Battery and device care submenu, and tapping Memory

Luke Wilson

Luke is a former news writer at T3 who covered all things tech at T3. Disc golf enthusiast, keen jogger, and fond of all things outdoors (when not indoors messing around with gadgets), Luke wrote about a wide-array of subjects for T3.com, including Android Auto, WhatsApp, Sky, Virgin Media, Amazon Kindle, Windows 11, Chromebooks, iPhones and much more, too.