Analysis Of The Raw Results

We call these results that we obtained the "raw results" because they are from smartphones that are in active use. Therefore, their memory usage results include third-party apps (like Facebook Pages, Whatsapp, Viber, etc.) running in the background as well as cached in memory.

We decided to include them anyway, to give us a rough idea of how much free memory these smartphones have in a real world situation. For an easier comparison, we summarised the results to show both in terms of absolute numbers and percentages. Take a look :

The results show that the ASUS ZenFone 2 does not only have a less-bloated operating system, it has significantly more free memory than the Samsung Galaxy Note 4 and the Samsung Galaxy S6 edge. In fact, the ZenFone 2 had almost half of its memory still available for apps to use.

The Samsung Galaxy S6 edge, on the other hand, had very little free memory (200 MB or less than 8%) for its apps to use. That is likely why we had trouble multitasking with 3-4 apps in active use, as noted in our review.

Filtering The Results

To obtain a "clean" comparison, we filtered out the third-party apps, whether they are running in the background or cached. This would allow us to compare the three smartphones as if they were brand new - with no third-party apps installed. Take a look at the filtered results :

Without any third-party apps, the ASUS ZenFone 2 boasted an astounding 2.35 GB of free memory, which is just under 62% of all available memory. The Samsung Galaxy Note 4 had almost 900 MB (or just over a third) of free memory. The Samsung Galaxy S6 edge remained the most "bloated" smartphone with the only 577 MB of free memory - less than a quarter of all available memory.

Multitasking Ability

Knowing how much free memory there is, is only part of the story. We also need to know how much memory is actually used by the apps we use all the time. To find out, we ran these common apps at full load to find out how much memory they would use.

Of course, these apps are designed to release memory quickly. Seconds after you stop using them, they start releasing their memory. Still, we often switch between the first four applications at the same time during our event coverage, so that's about 1.1 to 1.2 GB of memory used.

No wonder we sometimes lose our posts switching between the apps on the Samsung Galaxy S6 edge. On the other hand, we have never encountered a situation where we would run out of memory on the ASUS ZenFone 2. No matter how many apps we keep in active memory, it always has about 1-1.1 GB of free memory available!

The ASUS ZenFone 2 definitely has less bloatware than the two Samsung smartphones. That actually allows it to run very comfortably with 3 GB of RAM, from our analysis of the results. However, ASUS only offers the ZenFone 2 in 2 GB and 4 GB models. Therefore, the choice is very simple.

We highly recommend that you get the 4 GB version of the ZE551ML model, if you can afford USD 109 (RM 400) price premium over the 2 GB version. The 4 GB ZE551ML also comes with a faster 2.3 GHz Intel Atom Z3580 processor, instead of the slower 1.8 GHz Intel Atom Z3560.

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