[jessfyi]

The phones were released in October, while Gemini Nano's announcement happened in December. I, like other developers and consumers reaching for the smaller version, might've bought the device for the ability to run the ML features advertised in their keynote/based on the research they released the week prior to that (in the case of the former.)

During Gemini's initial release the language surrounding nano was that it was only the Pro initially, and I was happy to wait. The complete inability to run it, when the new Samsung phones can (including the model with 8GB as reported above) feels not only like a bait-and-switch/false-advertising, but a constraint based solely on driving sales. It does demand a clear explanation.

I care less about another potential Pixel class action, and more that I have to get another phone to test and deploy my apps to a smaller audience to.

[the-rc]

The two phones might have similar or even identical memory chips, but that doesn't mean the carving of the address space is the same. A more meaningful comparison would be looking at how much of those 8GB are pinned by the various components (kernel, graphic buffers, sound, camera, telephony, radios, etc.), how much is left to user and system apps, how the system is tuned for active/background processes. 8GB is just a single data point, too simplistic to draw any even remotely plausible conclusions.