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Comment by teyc | Hacker News Reader

Interesting how it has only 0.5GB of RAM. Is this meant to be Nokia's flagship Windows Phone product?

As an aside, I still think Apple got it right with the single hardware "home" button vs the three in WP7 and Android.

Comparing specs for phones with different OSes could be misleading. I think both iOS and Windows Phone are less hungry for RAM than Android. On the other hand, there is a rumor about another Nokia model, codenamed Ace, which is supposed to be the ultimate, hi-end one (probably some kind of a N8 successor, but that's just my guess).

Regarding buttons: personally, I love Android's "Back" button and wish iPhone had one like this as well.

I think only Android devices ship with >512MiB RAM. More RAM is more expensive and eats your battery. The iPhone seems to work fine with 512MB, perhaps it's just Android that needs it?

Browsers can always use more RAM.

What needs more than half a gig? The 4S copes. Going up to 1GB adds an unnecessary $9 to the BOM which eats into margins.

Biggest issue with more RAM is not money so much as battery capacity: it's very hard to gate RAM, so more ram means more transistors which are very hard to shut down, meaning lower battery capacity. And a higher surface area and more heat (assuming the manufacturing process is constant).

On a mobile device, more RAM is often a balancing act.

Would be nice if we could power down unused memory regions... Sounds easy to implement - a "this block is unused" line on the memory chip that would power down the block pointed to by the address bus. Any write to that region would automatically power it back on. Latency on the first write could be a problem unless we could cache writes (L4-cache within the memory module, perhaps? don't we already do something like it?)

The power up/down logic, hardware and individual power wiring could consume enough power and hardware to render the savings useless.

I wonder if someone actually tried it.

Looks like they chose to increase battery life and keep the phone relatively small rather than go with more powerful hardware. It's a good trade off. My iPhone 4 has never felt slow and it's a good size. I'd really like more battery life actually.

Just get the N9. 1GB of RAM and no buttons. Seems to solve your problems. Also, Lumia sells about half of the iPhone 4S price; high-end models are due in spring.

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