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Help 512mb of RAM and Froyo?

Aside from being 2 months old, my Incredible, under "SD card & phone storage", under "Phone memory" lists 748MB for "total space" and 558MB remaining.

Seems like it not just has 512MB, but it has nearly 50% OVER that.

i truly hope that was sarcasm...

anywho, that is pretty lame if the leaked 2.2 doesn't have the highmem kernel. that was the one real thing i was looking forward to for 2.2. sounds like i'll be staying on 2.1 until the kernel is changed. however i am happy we got the leak, i hope some chefs take use of it and cook us some tasty froyo treats
 
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Aside from being 2 months old, my Incredible, under "SD card & phone storage", under "Phone memory" lists 748MB for "total space" and 558MB remaining.

Seems like it not just has 512MB, but it has nearly 50% OVER that.

I too hope that was sarcasm. But, just in case it wasn't, you're referring to flash memory used to store apps. We're referring to the phone's RAM.
 
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No, it wasn't sarcasm actually. I'm probably misunderstanding something, but I assure you I know the difference between primary (RAM) and secondary (Hard Drive, etc.) storage mediums. I've built several computers over the years, and I'm not about to confuse the two.

That said, the "748MB total space" under "Phone memory" is NOT my phone's secondary flash storage; that would be listed under the "Internal Phone Storage" header, and clocks in at "6.60GB" -- a bit more than the 748MB I mentioned.

Which does beg the question: why does it say 748MB at all? (I have a 16GB microSD in there too, but it's under the "SD card" header) 748 seems a bit high for the internal RAM (isn't it?).
 
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No, it wasn't sarcasm actually. I'm probably misunderstanding something, but I assure you I know the difference between primary (RAM) and secondary (Hard Drive, etc.) storage mediums. I've built several computers over the years, and I'm not about to confuse the two.

That said, the "748MB total space" under "Phone memory" is NOT my phone's secondary flash storage; that would be listed under the "Internal Phone Storage" header, and clocks in at "6.60GB" -- a bit more than the 748MB I mentioned.

Which does beg the question: why does it say 748MB at all? (I have a 16GB microSD in there too, but it's under the "SD card" header) 748 seems a bit high for the internal RAM (isn't it?).

Your phone has 8GB of internal memory. 748MB of it is allocated to apps (known as "Phone Memory"). 6.6GB is for media storage (what we know as the "Internal Storage"). The rest of the 8GB is lost to formatting.
 
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Your phone has 8GB of internal memory. 748MB of it is allocated to apps (known as "Phone Memory"). 6.6GB is for media storage (what we know as the "Internal Storage"). The rest of the 8GB is lost to formatting.

That makes a bit more sense (logically), but is foolish of them to partition the internal storage at all.

That said: my phone says it's using 10% of it's memory (50MB) per System Panel, meaning it's seeing roughly 500MB. I'm not sure what people are saying that their phone doesn't see all 512MB (unless, of course, System Panel is also misleading).
 
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That makes a bit more sense (logically), but is foolish of them to partition the internal storage at all.

That said: my phone says it's using 10% of it's memory (50MB) per System Panel, meaning it's seeing roughly 500MB. I'm not sure what people are saying that their phone doesn't see all 512MB (unless, of course, System Panel is also misleading).

You mean you have 50MB free. 2.1 can't see any more than 256MB and thus only half of our RAM can be used right now.

The reason they partitioned the internal memory is to allow people to drag and drop to it from the PC. Android does not allow computers to access the memory the apps are stored on for security reasons. They gave us 748MB (which is way more than enough) for the apps that Android understands is locked down, and set up the rest to appear as an internal "SD card" type setup. That way it can be accessed via USB.
 
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You mean you have 50MB free. 2.1 can't see any more than 256MB and thus only half of our RAM can be used right now.

I was mistaken with my first post: I do have only ~50MB free, however it also says I'm using 90%. So my math was still correct: if 50MB = the 10% I still have free, the total is 50MB/0.1 = 500MB.

Unless System Panel sees the 256 "unused" and considers it "busy", or some other work-around, it seems like mine is seeing more than 256, though I'd be a bit surprised if everyone else is reporting the opposite.
 
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I was mistaken with my first post: I do have only ~50MB free, however it also says I'm using 90%. So my math was still correct: if 50MB = the 10% I still have free, the total is 50MB/0.1 = 500MB.

Unless System Panel sees the 256 "unused" and considers it "busy", or some other work-around, it seems like mine is seeing more than 256, though I'd be a bit surprised if everyone else is reporting the opposite.

I'm willing to bet it's a GUI issue. Most likely how System Panel works (this is how I would've written it) is that it hits up the low level hardware properties which will tell it how much memory it has. The Incredible knows it has 512MB of RAM, but the OS will only be able to see and use half of that. System Panel has to rely on the OS to give it how much is free, so since Android can only see 256MB, that's the most it can report free.

Say Android knows it is currently using 206MB of RAM, thus it would report that it has 50MB free. System Panel hits up the hardware and finds out how much total memory is there (512MB), and subtracts 50MB from it, so it thinks the system is using 462MB.

Make sense? The GUI of System Panel is not taking into account that phones can have more memory than their OS can see.
 
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