It’s a little-known fact that the iPhone is pretty tight when it comes to memory allocation.
The iPhone has 128MB of memory available to applications, which is pretty good by mobile phone standards, but incredibly small when compared to the gigabytes used by most desktop computers.
If 128MB wasn’t enough, the iPhone also reserves a lot of space for built-in apps (such as Mail) which run in the background.
This only leaves around 20-40MB free for apps, and if you have a lot of apps open the amount of memory can run low – this causes apps to run slowly. Some applications, such as Galaxy On Fire, ask you to restart your iPhone before playing to ensure you have the most amount of memory available.
Free Memory for iPhone by Recession Apps saves you the reset, and displays how much memory is available and can free up to 20MB at the touch of a button.
The developer has this to say about Free Memory:
"Free Memory allows you to free up runtime memory on your iPhone or iPod Touch.
The iPhone or iPod Touch comes only with 128MB of runtime memory. This is not to be confused with the storage memory which is usually 8GB, 16GB or 32GB of persistent memory.
The iPhone or iPod Touch OS does not implement virtual memory, so this means that the OS does not make use of the storage memory to increase the size of memory available to running applications.
Some native applications that come with the iPhone continues to run even after you have closed them, for example, the iPod player, Phone application, Mail application and the Safari web browser.
As you continue to use your iPhone or iPod Touch, these continually running applications continue to consume limited and precious runtime memory that could otherwise be available to other applications such as games and news applications causing them to quit unexpectedly.
With the Free Memory application, you can see how much runtime memory is currently available for applications."
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Comments received
me said on Tue, 26 May 2009
Now only if someone (please) could make an app that shuts down the iPhone or (iPod Touch) with a tap rather then holding the power-off. This would be great :) Thank you.
me said on Tue, 26 May 2009
Now only if someone (please) could make an app that shuts down the iPhone or (iPod Touch) with a tap rather then holding the power-off. This would be great :) Thank you.
VJ said on Wed, 27 May 2009
Sort of thing that should be built in.
qwerty said on Wed, 27 May 2009
@VJ Agreed. But it's good to see third-parties jump in to improve the iPhone. And good to see Apple allow this app on the store. Hopefull the next iPhone will have more memory to free up space for third party apps.
@percy. It's a free app. So no, you're not paying for it. I doubt if you've paid for an iPhone either ;-)
Artak said on Thu, 28 May 2009
Cool App! Love it! Using all the time on the road btw big apps like Maps, Mail, Safari, Skype... That is ONLY way to switch btw them Quick!
DeadZoning said on Tue, 02 Jun 2009
SBSetting is a very sweet 3rd party app. This feature allows to reboot/shut down/refresh all with a push of a button.
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