The handset has the memory, but the OS does not see it

Feb 14, 2009 08:54 GMT  ·  By

The highly anticipated Sprint Treo Pro has been delayed a few times so far, as many of you might already know, with the newest possible launch date set to March 15, this year. We previously learned that the delay was caused by some issues with Sprint's certification process, yet the carrier didn't unveil any details concerning the matter.

The Sprint Treo Pro seems to have been pushed back simply because the companies are working on leveraging the amount of RAM that remains free when no application is running. Some of you might remember that the device only has approximately 40MB of memory free even after a soft-reset, which is a rather small amount considering that it comes with 256 MB of RAM, and this is also 20MB lower than the European counterpart.

PhoneNews reports that this is the main reason behind the delay of the Treo Pro's launch in the United States: “HTC engineers (Palm has developed the handset in cooperation with HTC) have confirmed that the issue causing the continual delay of the Sprint Treo Pro lies in continuous ROM testing and certification to resolve a perpetual low free memory issue after many insiders discovered that the Treo Pro had ~40 MB of free memory with no applications running, despite shipping with 256 MB of RAM”

According to some voices over the Internet, the problem might be caused by the fact that the RAM on the handset is placed on separate chips, making it rather hard for the Windows Mobile operating system to recognize the extra amount of memory. In other words, the RAM is there, but the system does not see it, hence it is not using it. Moreover, it seems that some Touch handsets, including the HTC Touch Pro available on Verizon, share the same problem, which would make the assumption even more plausible.