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false....

my iPhone 4 has 351Mb of RAM available right now. How can a "stock" configured 3GS have more RAM available when it only has 256Mb total?

True, if you read my post you'll see I don't mention the iPhone 4 or iPad 2. Only the iPad 1 and iPod Touch 4.
 
Ok, I started having weird issues with 5.0 on my 3GS...

- Taking a Screenshot would show Volume for some reason.
- Images shown as thumbnails in the gallery weren't matching up to the correct image (a thumbnail of a picture of a tree would actually be a picture of something else when you tapped it).
- Performance started to really lag with Safari, lots of delays opening programs, etc. basically, out of RAM all the time.
- Mail kept downloading 50 emails over and over and wouldn't display anything.
- Mail kept making iCloud my default account (even though Gmail was made my default).

Basically, just normal "it's beta, not optimized, and generally doesn't work right" stuff. Plus, I was missing all my fun jailbreak apps.

I wiped it and went back to iOS 4.1. Despite what Apple says, you can still go back to an older iOS after installing 5.0.

On a clean boot, free RAM on the 3GS w/ 4.1 hovered around 150 MB (up to 170 MB when you free memory with SBSettings).
On a clean boot, free RAM on the 3GS w/ 4.3.3 hovered around 90 MB.

I can only assume 5.0 had even less RAM available. Besides the new Notifications/Widgets thing, other stuff is designed for devices with more memory. Mail will cache 50-1,000 items (4.x would cache 25-200), the Newsstand widget is _always_ loaded (I didn't see how to turn it off).

I'm looking forward to the next beta. There is still a chance that 5.0 will run as well as 4.3.3. (I don't expect 4.1 or 4.2.1 performance, though.)
 
when opening a game, at least Words With Friends, the volume comes up - does this mean each game has its own volume? or just all games have a different volume then the main?
 
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