Filed under: Hardware, Mobile, Android
Droid Does... only have 256MB of storage for apps
by Jay Hathaway Nov 9th 2009
Motorola's Droid is a sweet piece of hardware that's hyped to give the iPhone a run for its money, especially since it's running the new Android 2.0 OS, and works on the Verizon network in the US. We care about software here at Download Squad though, and there's some dismaying news about the Droid on that front: it has only 256MB for app storage. Seriously. The Droid reportedly only packs a 512MB ROM (that's the built-in memory), of which only half is allocated for apps. There are some iPhone games that couldn't even fit in that teeny-weeny storage space! But at least it's expandable, right? Um, nope. Google doesn't support installing apps to the SD cards that Motorola relies on, so developers are pretty limited in terms of file sizes for their Android 2.0 software.
The Droid may have a solid CPU and GPU for gaming, but games that take full advantage of that hardware are likely to need 100 megabytes or more of storage space. That's going to make things pretty tough until Android 2.0 comes to a device with a lot more pre-installed flash memory.
[via Daring Fireball]
UPDATE: While it's true that the Droid only has 256MB for apps, commenters have pointed out that various resources for the apps (graphics, etc.) CAN be stored on the device's SD cards. It looks like the situation isn't as bad as the numbers seem to indicate at first.
It's all over the place; Verizon is embracing 
Here in the UK, there's phonecalls that are deemed 'national rate' - they're calls to a non-geographic number, and the cost of the call is a little more than you'd pay for a general phone call (as the name implies). The company which uses the 0870 number makes a small amount of money on every minute that you're connected to the number, and when you use an 0870 number on a mobile phone, the network providers add their own fees on the top of the number - making a £0.10 per-minute call into (for example) £0.35 per-minute. In short, it's a great big money-spinner for the service providers.
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