One surprising thing about the iPhone (and about the iPad) is that it still only comes with 256MB of RAM. They seem to accomplish a heck of a lot with that, yet still that is very constricted once you start talking about multitasking and the like.
It is a pretty major update, but really the Giz leaks among others did take some steam out of it. It isn't as big of news simply because it isn't news - we long knew about it.
My prediction - next year we'll see A9 based smartphones/tablets with 512MB-1GB of RAM and these memory starvation issues will be a thing of the past. It certainly doesn't bode well in the short term for early adopters though.
The post PC era is upon us - too bad the hardware (and software) is still in it's infancy.
Also, I still can't help but laugh at this moniker of the "post PC era". The rest of us are still doing real work in Windows, Mac, Linux and the smartphone/tablets are accessories.
Most people who use computers really don't do much beyond browsing the web, reading e-mail, and balancing their checkbooks. Ergo, they consume content and use web apps.
Most of the people for whom mobile devices like the iPad are inadequate for doing their job are creating content (e.g. games, movies, books, etc) and web applications.
Revenue from the internet is from people using applications, viewing and clicking on ads, and buying content. You don't need a PC for that. We're not quite at the point where an average user doesn't need a personal computer no matter the OS, but we're close.
Possible, though the Evo 4G, Nexus One, HTC Dream, among a variety of other Android devices are coming with 512MB these days. One weird thing, though, is that one of the feature notes of Android 2.2 is "HIGHMEM support for RAM >256MB", so not sure how that plays into this.
-- Jef Raskin, during the design of the first Macintosh
(from http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/macintosh-project-genesis-an... )
We don't have the hardware problem so well licked that we can disregard it. IMHO programming phones like we program desktops is a serious mistake, and seriously hamper what we can do with mobiles (e.g., bloatier code results in need for faster hardware with little performance gain for it, thus raising battery, heat, device size problems).