Windows Mobile - Memory revisited

The Achilles heel of the Windows Mobile platform is memory utilization. The Windows Mobile Team has posted several good explanations of the different issues.

1. Why Persistent Storage Is A Good Thing - A description of the persistent storage model used in Windows Mobile.
2. RAM, ROM, NAND, NOR--that's a lot of capital letters... - An explanation of the different types of memory used in a Windows Mobile device.
3. How the Windows Mobile 5.0 Shell Handles Low Memory Situations - An explanation of how the OS handles low memory conditions and the thresholds which can be set by the OEMs.

The MDA has 128MB of ROM and 64MB of RAM. T-Mobile has allocated 47.46MB of the ROM to storage memory and 44.01MB of RAM to program memory. This means that the Extended ROM and OS image take up 80.54MB. On the storage memory front, the OS takes about 20MB, leaving 44.01 for the T-Mobile environment and user programs to run. With Xelencin's custom 2.26 ROM we are left with about 23.35MB for user selected programs.

I wrote a post about memory back in February which had some misconceptions about ROM and RAM which the Mobile Team's post cleared up for me. Memory management by the user is a fact of life. With the price of Storage Card memory dropping all the time, I upgraded to a 2GB Mini SD card. I only install key application in Storage Memory and the rest on the SD card. One of my tweaks redirects the Pocket IE cache to the SD card which helps tremendously. I also store all my email attachments on my storage card (inbox/menu/tools/options/storage). You can also move your Outlook E-Mail inbox to the storage card using this tweak found on identitycurve. I have not tried this yet.