Not so fast

When you're talking about flash storage, it's also valid to refer to it as flash memory, since that's what we call it at the hardware level. Don't believe me - go take a look at the datasheets for pretty much any flash IC, or any IC which contains embedded flash, and tell me what word the manufacturers themselves use to describe their devices...

Granted, at the consumer level it's a bit confusing, especially after years of trying to educate the average PC user that RAM isn't the same as hard drive space, but to anyone who works with flash devices it'd be entirely understandable why HTC would have used the M word in this context.

Then again, most of us who work with the stuff regularly tend to just refer to it as "flash", which makes me wonder if the comments from HTC got a bit distorted somewhere between the engineers who came up with the original explanation and the PR bods who released it into the big wide world - I can easily imagine the conversation between someone in HTC PR and HTC Engineering:

PR: "hey Joe, in this email you sent about the Desire not running Gingerbread, why would the camera be an issue?"

Eng: "Camera?"

PR: "yeah, you said it can't run Gingerbread because the flash isn't big enough"

Eng: "Oh... no, not that flash, the flash memory"

PR: "Ah, right, that makes more sense"

*tappity tap* press release goes out using the M word...

I disagree with Tony

You missed

Flash = memory

Because that's exactly what it is (albeit a persistent and slow version compared with RAM). The fact you want to use it for storage is irrelevant to it's classification as memory.

JMPO.

@Steve Evans

It's not so much the amount of Flash but how it's partitioned. 512mb is more than enough for OS+Sense+bundled crapware but the OS+Sense actually has to fit into the /system partition, usually allocated with only a little slop for it's initial shipping OS. There could be gigabytes of free space elsewhere, it wouldn't help.

Not a big problem if you're prepared to repartition the Flash but doing it non-destructively is challenging and it's risky enough you wouldn't want to do it on an OTA update. And it takes space from somewhere else, bad news if that's user space.

It might be more accurate to guess HTCs previous choices in partitioning made a normal upgrade impossible. I suspect a rough ride for many users unless HTC find some really good hacks. Freeing space is easy enough, just symlink things like /data/local to sdcard but its hard to avoid repartitioning.