When the Apple iPhone 4 launched we figured that it has 512MB of RAM. We later learnt that the processor was clocked at 800MHz. 15 months later as Apple has the iPhone 4S out, we start to wonder what has changed. Whats the ‘S’ factor this time? With the iPhone 3GS, Apple had doubled the memory, were they doing the same with iPhone 4S? Does the iPhone 4S have 1GB RAM? Well, no. The iPhone 4S retains 512MB RAM as seen in the iPhone 4.
While a lot of criticism has been seen about this, we have also speculated that Apple was cutting cost by not increasing the amount of RAM, but here is the flip side. Apple seems to be making its move to conserve battery life. Apparently the more the RAM, the more battery juice is sucked when the gadget is in use / idle.
When the iPhone 4S was announced we realised that the same form factor housed a Dual-Core processor (A5 running at 800MHz), much more advanced camera, new iOS 5, Siri and all this would take a toll on the battery life. Surprisingly the 3G calling goes from 7 hours on the iPhone 4 to 8 hours on the 4S but standby drops from 300 hours to 200 hours.
Apple has probably worked hard to yield higher performance by keeping the same amount of RAM. One thing we do notice is that iOS 5 gets no new multitasking APIs and the functionality remains limited on iOS devices. perhaps something we will see taking a bump with iOS 6 and 1GB RAM on iPhone 5 🙂