The importance of RAM and a hope for Monday
RAM – i.e. Random Access Memory, is all important. It’s the workspace which your phone’s OS runs in. And a critical parameter, in terms of what you can do with your smartphone, is how much RAM it has free. Free for you to do stuff. Like run a web browser, play a game, and so on.
Over and over again, in reviewing iPhone games for IPAL, I come across user reviews saying ‘Game is buggy, just crashes every time’. Now, no developer worth their salt would release a game that kept crashing. What’s happening is that the iPhone is physically running out of RAM. Starting with perhaps 40MB free, some of the fabulous 3D games need just about all of this and when the RAM runs out, the OS panics and shuts the game down. Result: one unhappy user. On my iPod Touch, with 60MB free most of the time (again, after the OS has loaded its bits and pieces up), I never, repeat never, hit RAM limits, incidentally.
