What does the console really do with that 2.5-3GB of reserved RAM?
Caching and playing safe. After the last gen, at least Sony wanted to play safe for obvious reasons.
Why is it that we have operating systems that are leaps and bounds more functional than what we have in consoles which run on significantly less memory. (we can have >an entire windows operating system on as little as 2GB of ram.
Yes, but which games do you play on a system with 2 gb of ram? They grant devs up to 5 gb and it seems totally sufficient. If this changes in the future, they will be able to easily change that but for now, it's sufficient.
I think this is the first time, consoles have "enough" ram.
Why can my android phone keep my game state saved in the background for any number of apps or games I'm playing yet my console can do this for only one game at a time?
Because games on a console require more ram and resources than apps on a phone.
Why are features so hard to implement and take forever to come along when everyone that owns the console is using the exact same OS and running it on the exact same >hardware?
How do you know they are hard to implement? It's more of a choice than not being able to. Also both companies are probably trying to not put leaking software in their systems so that hackers don't get opportunities to hack the system.
Why can we not use the consoles we have to build "small" apps for the console?
I don't understand that question.
Android and Ios started life with less than 128MB or RAM. Console operating systems proper started life with the PS3/360 with approximately 56 and 32MB or Ram >respectively. Yet both consoles were able to do quite a lot.
Android has 1 gb of ram nowadays easily in almost every phone. Again, it's choice, not being able to. Many people are even happy that their console concentrates on gaming and not apps.
And all these OSs have their roots in Linux on some level.
This is completely wrong.
Yet we can't even have a decently functioning browser.
This is something that of course is ridiculous. But I think that Sony using a webkit browser has to do custom modifications as they don't use common rendering tehchniques.
So how in God's name is it possible for my browser to crash when it has access to at least 5GB of Ram just for itself?
Because crashing has nothing to do with the amount of ram that a computer has (at least not necessarily). But: It could be that Sony is using something like ulimit so that single apps are only allowed to use a dedicated pool of resources and if this limit is exceeded, than the app will crash.
