I am looking to buy a new Palm Pilot. I compared two models, one at $179.00 and another at $249. Basically the higher end has more disk space, but it also has 8MB of RAM vs 2MB in the cheaper model. Does RAM even matter in Palm Pilots? Only one application can be opened at a time. Or are there uses for RAM?
On your Palm Pilot, everything is stored in the RAM. The more memory you have, the more addresses, emails, etc. you can store. As well, the applications themselves take up space (ie. the chess program on mine uses ~30kb of RAM). The only way to recover that space to use for something else is to delete the app. If you plan to use the Palm Pilot a lot, you should get the one with more memory. I have an old Palm Pilot Professional with 1Mb of RAM that is fine for my purposes, so 2Mb would be fine for light to medium usage. OTOH, I have a friend that has used all 8Mb on his and is now having to delete stuff.
To expand on Lord Derfel’s point, there is no disk space in a Palm Pilot, so the 8 MB of RAM is in fact what you are getting. It acts as both ‘disk’ (non-volatile storage) and ‘RAM’ (here I mean RAM in the PC sense - volatile storage) but physically it is all RAM. You rely on not running out of battery power and having a backup on your PC to avoid losing your data.