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Droid has 256 MB of memory for apps? Are you kidding?

It’s no secret that Tech Crunch has been on a mission to promote the Droid at all costs, probably because Arrington needs daily affirmation that dropping the iPhone was a good move. But in the midst of all the puckering up was this little gem of an article this morning:

http://www.mobilecrunch.com/2009/10/29/here-are-all-the-great-android-games-t…I had to do a double-take when I read the third paragraph. 512 MB of internal memory? Are you kidding me? In November of 2009, someone releases “the ultimate Android phone”, the phone that will “finally slay the iPhone” and it has as little storage as my Palm Treo did four years ago? Better yet, of that 512 MB, only 256 MB of internal storage is available for apps. And that’s not a Droid limitation; it’s an Android limitation. So no Android phone has enough space to hold more than 256 MB of applications.

I have more than a few apps on my iPhone that are bigger than that. Single apps, mind you. What good is running multiple apps at once, if you have no room to hold more than 5 or 10 decent ones on the entire phone, anyway? Sure, some great apps are very small. You don’t need gigabytes of memory to write a Twitter client. But that’s not the point. Imagine if someone came out with a laptop today, and then they told you that even though you have a 500GB hard drive, you can only use a total of 1 GB for applications. Would anyone buy that? Maybe your applications folder is currently smaller than that, but would you want to be told that it can never be bigger than that, no matter how big a hard drive you put into the machine later?

Just forget about any kind of decent game on Android. It’s completely out of the question. Which means that all the transformers tech nerd marketing for the Droid phone makes even less sense. Not even teenaged males are going to be interested in this now.

And don’t talk to me about SD cards. You can’t store apps on them. Only music or video, or other media files. So they’re useless to this discussion. You can write all the articles of praise you want, tell me about the future belonging to Google, etc. But now I’m just going to laugh at you. At least until Google comes to its senses and lifts this absurd limitation. What did Steve Jobs say when introducing the iPhone a few years back? “Baby software.” Exactly.