Internal Phone Storage != RAM

So all this time I've kinda assumed I had a HTC Magic with 288MB - and I've noticed that as I install apps it drops down a bit - it's currently at 210MB. I keep thinking this platform is like WinMo in that regard.

But it's not. The Internal Phone Storage in your HTC Magic settings is actually the leftover from the 512MB ROM - and your apps are installed here and not in RAM like I thought.

To find out how much RAM you have - you need to pull up a shell and type 'cat /proc/meminfo'

You can do this using adb shell if you like - as is shown below:

# cat /proc/meminfo
cat /proc/meminfo
MemTotal: 197144 kB
MemFree: 12076 kB
Buffers: 36 kB
Cached: 30404 kB
SwapCached: 0 kB
Active: 146612 kB
Inactive: 16364 kB
SwapTotal: 0 kB
SwapFree: 0 kB
Dirty: 0 kB
Writeback: 0 kB
AnonPages: 132560 kB
Mapped: 16756 kB
Slab: 7676 kB
SReclaimable: 1360 kB
SUnreclaim: 6316 kB
PageTables: 7724 kB
NFS_Unstable: 0 kB
Bounce: 0 kB
WritebackTmp: 0 kB
CommitLimit: 98572 kB
Committed_AS: 2211832 kB
VmallocTotal: 319488 kB
VmallocUsed: 77564 kB
VmallocChunk: 183292 kB

Now the first line is what you want to know - and in my case I have 197MB of RAM available to the OS. So if I have a 288MB HTC Magic where does it all go?
The rest of the memory (around 94-95MB for most ROMs from what I've heard) goes to your radio, framebuffer and other hardware and is not accessible from the OS directly. The original HTC Dream's are the same - except they report a MemTotal of 98MB as they have only 192MB ram total.

Interesting huh?