When Steve Jobs announced
the iPhone 4 a few weeks ago, the company was happy to tout such
features as its high-resolution Retina display, thinner body,
FaceTime chat, 3-axis gyroscope, and increased battery life. However,
Jobs left out some other important details that tech heads want to
know like the clock speed of the A4 processor and the amount of RAM
onboard.
Today, we have an answer to at
least one of those questions. Mac Rumors is confirming
that the iPhone 4 now has 512MB of RAM which is double what's
included on the year-old iPhone 3GS and the recently
introduced iPad. The increased RAM is likely to be welcome news
for potential customers due to a problem that numerous iPad users
have encountered with page caching issues in Mobile Safari due to the
iPad's 1024x768 screen coupled with just 256MB of RAM.
John Gruber of DaringFireball
fame described
the issue shortly after the launch of the iPad:
There’s one
severe problem in Safari for iPad, though: memory crapping out.
MobileSafari for iPhone has always allowed you to open up to eight
pages at a time. It tries to keep them all truly open, in RAM, so
that you can quickly switch between them. But when it runs out of
memory it starts flushing some of the pages. It doesn’t forget the
URLs for those pages, and, in recent versions, it saves a static
thumbnail image of the rendered page, but when you switch back to
those purged pages, MobileSafari must reload the page...
The iPad also
has 256 MB of RAM. But, in my use, iPad’s Safari isn’t able to
keep nearly as many pages open as I can on my 3GS. In fact, sometimes
it seems I can only have one, and every page I switch to gets
completely reloaded. This is more than just annoying — it can lead
to data loss if you have unsubmitted form data sitting in an “open”
iPad Safari page.
With 512MB of RAM onboard and a
slightly lower resolution than the iPad – 640x960 – the iPhone 4
hopefully won't have the same page caching issues and could possibly
even provide better performance.
512MB of RAM puts the iPhone 4 on par
with powerhouse Android phones like the HTC
EVO 4G.
