Some users felt the sluggish immediately after the ICS update on the Galaxy Note. Some users even want to go back to Gingerbread, as commented by some users on the post of Top 10 questions on ICS update for your Galaxy Note and Ice Cream Sandwich is coming to your Galaxy Note
Of course, it is NOT necessary to go back to GB. Don’t over-react on the feeling. In this post, I will share with you how to read your available RAMs, and some tips to make your Note more responsive.
During the ICS update, for some unknown reasons, all apps will be started (we all know all apps will be re-installed by the updater, but I am not sure why they are started). So, after the update, your Note will not so responsive. A quick solution is rebooting your phone after the update. Most apps will not run automatically, so, after the reboot, only some apps started.
Now, you can check your memory (RAM) usage through Settings–Applications–Running. You should have 200-400MB free RAM. This is more than sufficient for most apps!! For example, for my note as shown below, it still have 299MB free RAM after running a few days.
But if I use the bundled Task Manager, it reported only 101MB free RAM as shown in the screenshot below. This is why a lot of users get scared!. Do not trust any task manager or system info apps. Most of them suck. Most of apps report available RAM inaccurately.
Wait a minute, the specification says my Galaxy Note have 1GB ram, but it shows I only have about 800MB. Is Samsung cheating us? Surely not. The about 200MB RAM is reserved by the system, mainly for GPU. In your Galaxy Note, there is a GPU (Mali 400-MP, to be precisely) whose duty is to render whatever to be shown on the screen. All such embedded GPUs do not have “dedicated” memory: they have to share the system RAM (your 1GB RAM). As GPU need contiguous (both physical and virtual) address, memory should be … Read the full post