I understand you are a bronze II but I have to disagree with you immensely on this one.  I previously operated a 9530 and I had to constantly complete battery pulls or use quickpull every evening just to get my memory back up to 18mb from 518kb.  I went to the 9550 and WOW! what a difference like night and day.  I have zero maintenance on this phone (knock on wood) it has been superb to the 9530.  The 9550 is quick in all faucets (maybe I am one of the lucky ones).  Camera operation is 10x the 9530 as is the scrolling thru the home screen.  So I would say "yes" it does matter if he has a 9530 or 9550.  Oh, and I have had it since November 09 and have done one battery pull just to see if it raised my memory up any.  It did a couple of MBs, I have at least 12 apps and the memory is never under 96.3mb.