Some Memory is More Equal than Other Memory

Some folks are running into a 'gotcha' on the new Treo 650 PDAphone as well as the Tungsten T5 PDA, both from PalmOne.

Good news: You will never lose data as a result of your battery running down, and, IIRC, you're less likely to lose data if a reset's needed.

Bad news: You can only use, at most, 10MB of RAM for the current running app, its data, and whatever the OS needs. And, the extra processing and slower speed of non-volatile memory could slow down the Tr650 and T5.

This Red Mercury website article Explains It All.

P1 gave those two new machines a real file system for the don't need-battery Flash Memory, and then has the OS load whatever you're running into RAM.

The file system allocates storage in half-KB chunks, so the interstitial space is wasted. Therefore, you probably will lose close to n/2 KB, where n is the number of files in the Flash RAM.

Whenever you run out of that 10MB of volatile RAM, whoops! Game's over. I've never come close to that myself, but there could be apps on the Treo 600 with large chunks of data that won't work on the 650. (Now, that's theoretical. if anyone actually encounters this, please post here.)

Lastly, because Flash RAM (again, IIRC) is slower than volatile RAM, and the CPU will be moving data and applications in and out of the Volatile RAM as overhead, performance could suffer when compared to a Treo 600.

But, to be assured my shoephone would never run get permament amnesia when it runs out of juice? Priceless.