Some thoughts from an engineer...
-expandable memory card slot
The advantage of having memory built-in, is that it's always there and there's less chance of an OS glitch recognizing it.
The advantage of replaceable cards are two fold: 1) can swap in different movies, etc easily. 2) can expand (up to a point) memory when it becomes cheap enough.
Personally, I prefer the cards, for the same reason I like using memory cards in my camera etc. I get to buy what I want, and swap as needed. Plus I can plug them into my desktop and edit/transfer data directly.
For non-techies such as my wife, I'd say yes to built-in memory instead.
As they say, it's what you do with it that counts.
As to those talking about the
possible "600 MHz" cpu rating, so what? It's not being used, and might not be ABLE to be used because of other component limitations. Especially not having a large battery option.
Definitely good to have more RAM, especially since Safari seems to use it for cache.
(Having started with 1Mhz cpus with 1K of memory, I do think it's ridiculous how much RAM so-called "modern" systems use.)
-ability for processor to use flash memory as additional RAM
The type of flash that's used in the iPhone cannot be used as program memory. It can only be accessed serially in blocks, and erased /written in 256K chunks, not by individual bytes.
Flash also has limited write cycles, as little as 5,000 in the iPhone's case. Perfect for slow changing stuff like multimedia files. Not so good for anything dynamic.
The kind of flash memory used for programs is much slower than RAM, and far less capacity than the kind used for storage.
I'm a fan of those. I keep spares charging so I can just slap one in as needed.
More importantly, I can buy larger aftermarket batteries that almost double my time.
-push email that is as good as RIM's
Won't happen until RIM's patent runs out in another decade or so. RIM paid a half Billion dollars for the rights.
