I thought the HTC Dream/G1 also had 128 MB RAM, but you're correct - it had 192 MB! :)

> The power of Objective-C?

Sort of. I kind of like objective-C in that it gets more fundamentals right than it gets wrong - better than fucking reimplementing Java and then hoping with years and millions of dollars it will perform acceptably - it’s quite sad given how naive ObjC is at it’s core. But iPhone probably would have been successful even with plain C or C++ with a decent library.

Smartphones and PDAs like Palm and PocketPC arguably did relatively more with much less - (this is not to diminish the UX achievement or advancement of iPhone so please put the pitchforks down).

Yeah but it couldn't multi-task could it?

I don't think an Android device with that much RAM would manage much multitasking.

iPhone OS actually could multitask with jailbreaking, though you quickly discovered the limitations of that amount of RAM.

This is less of an issue today (although there aren't very many jailbreaks to take advantage of it) but back then it was pretty clear the device ran with very little RAM to spare. The best tweaks were fairly simple when it came to RAM usage but true multitasking or other things that stayed resident generally had a massive hit on system performance.

Windows Phone and Symbian could.

Well, NeXTstep could multitask in 8MB of RAM. And do it well in 16MB.

I mean the concept of multitasking takes basically no overhead. The question is what resources your "average app" takes. On NeXTSTEP those requirements were quite low.

Symbian, Windows Phone did just fine with C++, and also .NET.

The power of AOT compiled languages instead of plain interpreter.

Apparently the original Android as it was bought by Google, was planned to use JavaScript, then they pivoted into Java, and it took decades until they got any kind of good AOT/JIT story (starting with Android 5).

I would say it's more the power of incentives, really. Android has historically never had the performance investment that Apple has put on their platform. If anything, early Android was much closer to iOS in terms of hardware specs and diverged quickly as they were unable to keep their resource usage down.

I wouldn't call the JIT, AOT and PGO efforts nothing, and stuff like project butter.

On the other hand going with a basic Assembly interpreter for Dalvik, when Nokia and Sony-Ericson already had JIT compilers for Symbian, while claming Android was better, no comments.

Likewise when comparing Symbian Series 60 3rd edition phones with Android.

There are plenty of smart people who work on Android system performance, unfortunately the work put into iOS overshadows it.