Whether or not you actually need 8GB of RAM in a smartphone is a conversation and a half on its own, but when Samsung said that the Galaxy S10 and Galaxy S10+ would all have at least 8GB of RAM, that's what buyers are expecting. Unfortunately, there seemed to be a ton of misinformation, software weirdness, and wrong specs sheets that say that some Galaxy S10 models would actually only have 6GB of RAM.
6GB, 8GB, or 12GB?
Some of this confusion comes from Samsung directly, too. Their own website lists a few models of the Galaxy S10 with just 6GB of RAM, plus just 6GB for the 128GB carrier phones, at least on their business website since the consumer site doesn't go into detail quite as much.
The carrier models of the S10+ with 1TB of storage list 12GB of RAM, but the unlocked model only says 8GB. All of this is despite Samsung announcing the phones with 8GB of RAM, excluding the 1TB model that had 12GB.
To make this even worse, some demo phones at stores and retailers only list 6GB of RAM, and that's been all over Reddit. At a glance it seriously looks like Samsung is trying some false advertising to sell phones.
It looks much worse than it actually is, however. According to Samsung, some of the demo phones are simply showing incorrect amounts of memory (pre-release software, maybe?) and the website is, well, simply wrong. Samsung has clarified and confirmed that all models have 8GB of RAM, except for the 1TB/12GB model. Ignore everything else, even from Samsung's own website right now.
There's no telling why this is happening, except possibly that Samsung did have plans to mix up the memory configurations on these devices prior to launch. When it got closer to launch they might have decided to simplify the lineup and only offer basically one configuration with the extra bump for the highest end phone, and the software wasn't updated in time for display phones to reflect that.
Either way, don't freak out about canceling those pre-orders.
via: Android Police
I think your theory is bang on – Samsung probably initially intended to have both 6GB and 8GB models of the phones and the site marketing depts and even some of the older firmware might not have been properly updated.
Another possibility is that they always had 8GB on all phones, even on phones that were to be sold with 6GB, and they used software to just lock those phones to 6GB.
Either way, I personally think 8GB on the phones is a great move. 6GB would have been sufficient too.
Now we want to see 6-8GB on most Tablets too. Too many tablets still sport 2GB or less.