HTC's HD2 carrying a secret stash of hidden RAM

Will this phone ever stop surprising us? Rumblings that all HD2 devices have 576MB of RAM inside them started developing in China a little while before T-Mobile unveiled its upgraded US-bound handset with, funnily enough, the same amount of memory. Now, those trusty souls over at XDA-developers have concocted custom ROMs for everyone else to free up the extra 128MB of operational headroom, and user feedback appears to corroborate the theory. We can hardly begin to fathom the reasons for HTC disabling part of its available hardware, other than to guess that a WinMo 7 upgrade was in the company's plans for this phone all along and it just wanted to keep its ability to handle the new OS under wraps. Video and pictorial evidence of cracking past the 448MB barrier after the break.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

[XDAfan Posted Jan 29th 2010 11:28AM]

@JudgeDredd lol! that was added after just like the youtube video! all credit goes to xda anyways they rock. peace out

[JudgeDredd Posted Jan 29th 2010 11:47AM]

@JudgeDredd Dude stop being a tool. The link to the .mp4 has always been there. The whole Damn MTW post links to this: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=5450800&postcount=58

[Nitesh Posted Jan 29th 2010 8:29AM]

I'm guessing it would be unlocked when WinMo 7 comes out.

[petey1111 Posted Jan 29th 2010 9:43PM]

@Nitesh
yea, i was thinking this was to make sure there was certain RAM available when WinMo 7 was bumped to it, not to hide its ability to run it. if I currently had an HD2, I would wait to hear from MS about it or at least wait till the US Version came out to see if they use it somehow.

[majg Posted Jan 29th 2010 8:43AM]

hmm, can't wait for xbox live to show up on these

[BratPAQ Posted Jan 29th 2010 9:00AM]

"disabling part of its available hardware"

what hardware was disabled? the freed-up was not "disabled" right? it is being used by the OS/firmware and XDA devs removed the unnecessary files.

[logic thinker Posted Jan 29th 2010 9:51AM]

Zero dockability

it takes more than specs alone to dethrone the iPhone.

[perpetual98 Posted Jan 29th 2010 10:22AM]

@logic thinker

You hit the nail on the head! Dockability is what makes the iPhone reign supreme!

[smover Posted Jan 29th 2010 10:55AM]

i knew my phone has more than 488mb, this value wasn't logical at all. The HD2 is DA BEAST ^^

[goodguytoday Posted Jan 29th 2010 2:16PM]

I'm a computer engineer. One reason why memory could be hidden is because there may be a certain percentage of defect at the edge of the memory chips during initial manufacturing. Therefore hiding that chunk of memory would be a workaround before they fix the manufacturing process. This is just one example of possibilities for the ignorant.

[chrisg1968 Posted Jan 30th 2010 9:49PM]

@goodguytoday

Thats rubbish, if you are a computer engineer you would know that RAM has data written to it all over the place thats why its called Random Access Memory, not synchronous memory which has data written to it in a logical stream or in other words in order.......

[goodguytoday Posted Feb 2nd 2010 7:51AM]

@chrisg1968

Please don't go around saying things are rubbish unless you know the material well. What you say is partially true, but you forgot to add two words, memory address. No one here is talking about random vs synchronous. It is called Random Access Memory, but of what memory address? Hiding the defective part of the memory address segment will render the random access to be contained to only the good block of addresses.