Windows Phone Thoughts: Windows Mobile and Memory Management - Why is it so Dysfunctional?

Sometimes Windows Mobile devices embarrass me. :-( I have a consulting client using an XDA2 and it was in her purse and the record button got pressed (same old problem). I had forgotten to change the "only power button can turn the device on" because it had hard reset randomly on her a few weeks prior. So anyway, she had a voice recording that completely filled up the memory on her device. When a Windows Mobile device gets to where it has 50 KB of memory left, it completely falls apart. In her case, after she plugged it into power, it soft reset over and over (three times apparently), then hard reset. Then she calls me and asks why it happened. And what can I tell her?

It kills me that these devices are so fragile, that they have no software measures to free up memory. I've seen this scenario play out over and over where one thing or another, whether it's Notes, PIE, or something else fill up the memory, and there are no tools built into the OS to recognize that there's a low memory situation and do something about it. Why do we have a Disk Cleanup tool in Windows XP, where most of us have 60+ GB hard drives and rarely run out of space, but we lack something so vital on a device that has limited storage space? Equally as important, why doesn't Pocket Internet Explorer have an option to limit the cache size on the device? Why doesn't Notes have an option to keep "x MB memory free" and stop recording when the device starts to run out of memory? To my knowledge, there isn't a single Windows Mobile application that has any options for the preservation and management of memory on the device.

Why is there so little attention paid to memory management on these devices? That's a question I have no answer for.