I would appreciate any help. I am a physician and I basically use by smartphone for work. I have multiple medical applications on the phone. I have used a palm TX for a long time. I brought a Blackberry Storm. I am now ready for a new phone. The Blackberry storm did not work well for me because it lacked enough memory. I still have to use my Palm TX. Most of my applications use main memory and not the sd card. For my next smartphone I need more main memory. I think the storm has 256. When I reviewed the other phones I like the palm or the droid, but the memory issue is confusing to me. They discuss ROM memory RAM memory and flash memory. I already know that the sd card is not very useful for me, but I am unsure which palm or droid has the most "main memory" for my applications. I also like going onto the internet and getting Emails and Text messages on my phone. Which phone is best for me between the palm or droid lines. Thank you
Do you know for sure if your apps will run on a Droid?
on phones, at least from what I've seen, program memory, aka main memory can be used along side SD cards. but in short, RAM is what the program runs in temporarily, the ROM is where the root data is stored (the operating system and stock apps). my omnia 2 gives me 8GB of program memory, and like 256 MB of RAM, then I have an 8GB card in the phone, giving me over 16GB of space to use for apps, music, videos, ect.... ROM does not matter to you as an end user,
I love my Motorola Droid. Personally, I think the Motorola Droid has less problems than the HTC Droid. That's just my feeling from reading posts on this website.
I don't remember the specific numbers for each phone but RAM is just like the RAM on your computer. It is Random Acess Memory and is essentially the computer's short term memory. It is a slower longer term Cache memory than L1, L2 or L3 Cache memory (usually located on the chip). Ram is essentially the memory used for running programs. Like short term memory it is in cue waiting to be acessed by working memory of the computer for processing. ROM is kind of like the brain stem. It houses the core functions. It is a little different on a phone than on a computer. On a computer the ROM is where the BIOS is stored so like the really core functions. On Android it houses both the BIOS which is smaller and the Operating system and all Apps (currently). The Android developers have been testing apps to SD and/or internal phone flash memory but there is no official time frame beyond coming soon. It may be available in the next release but may not be available until the release after that. The incredible has a built in 8GB (actually a little less and I haven't really been able to figure out how they call it 8gb to get what they have unless they are really rounding or they are counting from bits instead of bytes) and is capable of up to 32gb of SD memory. So it's not like the huge solidstate harddrives in the iphone that can use the whole area for app storage but it is a monster in the current accessible memory market.
The incredible has 748MB of ROM. It is pretty much the largest available since before this phone came out it was assumed that 512 was still the cap. IT appears the true cap is currently 748 because the ROM is actually 8GB or and actual 7.45GB(8GB is based on a base 10 the actual disk size is on a base 8 system) if you subtract the 748 meg from that you end up getting approximately 6.6 GB when you figure it using true figures instead of marketing figures. So they gave us 8Gig ROM but couldn't use all of it as ROM because of the limitations of ANDROID. Hopefully this will be lifted soon and we will have a cavern to load apps into.
Your biggest issue with the incredible will be battery. You WILL have to get an extended battery. There are some reliable extended batteries out there but if they happen to go wrong you won't be covered. An official extended battery is in the Verizon system but does not have stock yet so basically it exists but hasn't been produced to stock levels yet. Battery life on the DROID Is outstanding but it will probably take longer for it to have as much free space. It's ROM is 512 and ANDROID takes up part of that.
Thank you for your response. I am interested in what the flash memory does. Can that be uses for applications like epocrates, skyscape, ,merckmedicus and for applications. I know that the memory card is not very helpful but i do not understand what the flash memory does.
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