the fact of the matter is what i always suspected from my own small testing. no matter what today plugins you have and if you have none at all gradual use of the phone results in depleted memory. its the nature of the OS. And I think it is fantastic that with 4-5 days of use only 10mb of ram gets consumed by the OS.
The problem is the stingy allocation of ram AND rom. Its like HTC for example, went backwards going from their wm2003se devices like the ppc 6600 which had 128MB of Rom (~40MB free?) and 128MB of Ram.
Now the Rom is debetable. yeah we have sd/minisd cards so you can load all programs to your hearts content. Personally I think it would be nice to be able to load all your programs to rom and leave minisd for stuff like music, books, databases, maps, gps maps and so on. But hey thats just me and I adjusted with a 2 gig card.
However the ram is inexcusable. They could have easily stuck with 128MB of Ram the ppc 6600 had. If they did instead of 24-30 mb of ram when we first boot up we would have ~90. And it would allow even more and flexible multitasking which is what windows mobile devices are supposed to be all about, and with 2+ weeks of use, even if the OS consumes 30megabytes we would have ~60 to work with.
And the excuse by manufacturers that Ram uses battery is laughable. The PPC 6600 lasts just as long, if not longer than our phones. If anything stuff like EVDO, regular phone calls and wifi use the most power. Hell it doesnt even make much sense really when they say that.
Our devices need more ram not less. a 128mb PPC 6700 with the same cpu would be snappy as hell, even with beacoup today plugins and skinning and so on. Its like on the PC, you could have a 3 Gig cpu with 128mb of ram on XP and it would crawl once you started running multiple programs, even if you closed them out afterwards. Its why our devices are so powerfull cpu wise they can run emulators at great speeds without breaking a sweat but once we open 6+ programs the OS starts to crawl. The low ram actually holds the devices back. What good is a 400 mhz cpu not being fed at a nice data rate to crunch numbers and calculate.
According to the poster at the Windows Mobile blog WM5 was designed to run in 32MB of RAM. Microsoft then put 64MB of RAM a requirement for manufacturers. RAM costs money.. it's no surprise that the device has the minimum required amount.
You're also a little confused about the RAM of the PPC 6600... it had 128MB of RAM shared between storage and program memory. The 6700 has 64MB of RAM and 64MB of Flash storage. They really aren't that different except the storage will survive battery loss on the 6700...
You have to remember that RAM uses power whether the device is turned on or not. Plus the power consumption rises with the amount of RAM. The problem arises not in daily use, but in standby time. If you have a 64mb device with a six day standby time, if you put 128mb of RAM in it you now have 3 days of standby time. If the battery is half used on Friday when you leave it it only has 1 1/2 days of standby time, so when you pick it up Monday morning it is dead. If you were to put 256mb of RAM in, it wouldn't last overnight. Remember that the huge majority of users are average folks with limited knowledge, therefore devices MUST be designed to be user friendly and not loose their battery when not used for short periods of time. With persistent storage you have not lost your data when the battery dies, but what good is it if you can't access it because the battery is dead. In a nutshell this is the single biggest reason why there is not more RAM on mobile devices.
Striking the proper balance of features and hardware on mobile devices is critical. If you want more RAM you MUST have more battery. If you have more battery it increases the size and weight of the device. Mobile devices are no different than any other consumer product, they are designed for the majority of users. 64mb of RAM happens to be a very acceptable amount of RAM for the majority of users. A bigger, heavier device is not. Hence the hardware configurations we are seeing.
If the RAM were written to Flash at power off, wouldnt that solve the problem of the RAM always having to be supplied with power? power up might lag a little more but with the proper type of flash, the effect could be minimized. Not only that, but only temp files and user data would have to be stored. System information wouldnt. This is similar to the hibernate function in WinXP where the RAM is written to the hard disk in order to power off but not lose data.
The startup time for the device would suffer terribly. Especially since it would have to write it first before actually shutting down. Can you imagine if you had a couple programs open and it was wrote, then a call came in and it would have to resume itself. 1.28+ seconds depending on SCI value, then the rewrite, then call the ringtone and display caller information. It would be excrutiating. I think the device is sluggish on the startup already. My Treo 650 started MUCH faster, and my Treo 600 even faster than that. Another thing to think about would be the constant writing would wear out the flash memory. I think flash memory is good for about 1 million writes. I bet I have turned my on atleast a few thousand times. I get 500+ calls a month and atleast 2000 text aswell. That is 2500 writes a month just for calls and text, now factor in wakeup for alarms, to check the time, to check appointments, to play games, etc. I turn the phone on and off at least 100 times a day. How long would the memory last at 5000+ writes a month? That is not including installation and file saving writes.
Honestly I wish it had a volitale memory. The speed would be tons better. Make it so the battery takes an act of god to knock out and put a backup program built in. Need to change the battery, shut the device down and it saves everything.
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