Why is the N97 processor underclocked?

Question

anyone who's used the 97 would agree with me on this- the 97 could have been better if it had a little more processing power.
out of curiosity, what's nokia's reason to underclock the processor? to save on battery and produce less heat? is it technically feasible for nokia to come up with a firmware update that makes the 97's processor run at its native clock speed? can it be overclocked? Whats the native clock speed of the 97's processor? And could it be possible to add /swap (virtual memory) support on the 97 like maemo? It would be great if we could make use of a part of that 32GB as RAM.
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Answer 1

Everything is always possible, the question is how useful it is.
You seem to be throwing ideas around without really understanding what you are talking about, which makes it less meaningful to respond.
How can you, for instance, claim that the processor is underclocked when you have no idea what frequency it runs at, or what the theoretical maximum is? Nor understand what the effect would be of having the processor run at a higher frequency.
In short, yes, the N97 is unfortunately a bit short on a few resources. I have not seen any evidence that processing power is the problem. The CPU can run at different frequencies in order to save power and reduce heat. But you can rest assure that the processor is running as fast as possible when needed. It runs at lower speeds when the computations don't need to be produced faster than can be done at that speed.
Yes, there is too little ram in the device. This is obvious when you get messages from the device saying things basically mean you need to close some application. Also obvious at times when you run some program that consume lots of memory, and it suddenly quit, and you need to restart it (such as the messaging application when reading in large mailboxes for email).
This can be "helped" if you have virtual memory, and use disk as a page file. This is what you suggest. However, the resutl of that is that while programs will not abort, they will become slower. If speed is your problem, then adding a page file will not help.
Another issue is the size of C: on the device. This is a problem since some programs must be installed on C:, and some programs only use C: for storing data that is needed.
However, reinstalling software to E:, as well as changing those applications that can to use E: as well solves much of this problem.
One perhaps larger problem is the speed of both C: or E:, which cause problems when something happens, such as receiving a phone call. At that point, the phone needs to search through the phone book in order to get a name matching the callers number. This can take a while. After this, you might want to display a picture for the caller, which also means reading from C: or E:. In addition to this, you want to play some tune, which is another file from C: or E:. At this point it should be obvious that you are reading a lot of stuff from C: or E: at the time you receive a phone call. The mass storage memories are not as fast as ram, and it would appear that the speed of these are also a bottleneck in the N97. Using a pagefile from these slow memories is probably not something that people would be happy with (and I don't even know if Symbian is written in a way that allows processes to use a page file).
So in short, the problems in the N97 cannot be solved with less than a hardware redesign. Most speed problems are solveable, and the solutions are easy and well known. However, they all require more ram (to use as caches), which is the one thing missing in the N97.
So in the end, the one main problem with the N97 is the lack of ram.
Look at the specs of other "smart" phones, and you'll see that this is one thing where the N97 really comes up short.
Apple also semi-solves this problem by only allowing one program at a time to run (thus limiting the amount of ram needed), but this limitation is not something that impress people around here much. (And yes, I know that the new version of the Apple iPhone OS have "multitasking", but it's not really much more of multitasking than before...)