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A few new user frustrations

T

the_prof

Lurker
Hi all, having casually read this forum for a few weeks, I thought I'd make my first post, and ask a bit of advice.

I've had an HTC Desire for a couple of months now, and I'm mostly liking it. I consider it to be my second phone (my 'personal' phone), as I have a dreaded iPhone 4 for work. Now, I'm afraid to say for fear of wriling everyone that the iPhone 4 tends to get used a lot more than the Desire for general use, but there are a few reasons for this.

Firstly, I think I got used to the iPhone interface a bit quicker, and thus I find it easier to use. Secondly, I'm having a few issues with the Android that I just haven't got around to fixing yet.

So, I bought a nice capacious 32GB microSDHC card for my Desire, thinking I could fill it up with apps willy nilly, try some out and not worry too much about filling it up. Only now do I find out that it's not quite as simple as that.

I've had a 'low space' message appearing on the device since about the second day I had it, and I can't seem to get rid of it no matter what I do.

I've followed various advice on these very forums, to clear the caches, cookies, and move everything over to the SD cards.

Quite a few apps just don't seem to want to move over to the SD card (the 'move to SD card' option is greyed out), and every other app is moved over, yet I still seem to have next to no space left.

Short of 'rooting' the phone (which I'm not keen on doing), and moving everything over that way, I don't see what else I can do. It's got to the stage where the phone doesn't have enough space to cache the programs I download in order to move them to the SD card.

In my mind this is a major design oversight, especially considering most of these Android phones only have a couple of hundred MB of memory, most of which appears to be taken up by running programs, of which there seem to be quite a few.

Surely I'm not the only person to experience this? Am I being completely stupid? I'd appreciate any help ;)
 
Welcome to the forums!

Low space since day 2??

Did you install a LOT of apps already by then?

Your Desire - at 576 MB - has more ram than my Evo and I've not seen that message - and I have a LOT of apps and apps running (or being managed).

Please share more about your situation - and I'm presuming you did a factory reset when you said you cleared caches - maybe it something simple, maybe you've gotten that random bad handset - it happens.
 
Not all apps can be moved to SD card and most of the really big apps already install to SD card.

I can't say that I have ever seen android complain about being low on space... usually it tries to install then balks.

Also... newer devices have much larger storage than older ones.
I think we are up to 8 or 16Gb on phone storage now...
I can't fill up the 8 on my Droid X let alone the SD card.
I know that doesn't help you but at least in the future it won't be an issue.
 
Hi there, thanks for the reply!

Yes, I confess, I installed a lot of things to begin with. The reason I started the deluge was that I was trying to compare apps with their iPhone counterparts like-for-like. Soon after, I started getting the low memory, despite finding the 'Move to SD' function on each app. The main reason for my interest in the Android platform was some of the scientific apps it has, and it's ability to emulate various devices without the restrictions of the iPhone platform, which it does very well.

I should mention that I haven't yet tried a factory reset - simply because I thought it might involve losing all my settings, which I wanted to avoid. If that's the only way to solve this, I'll do it, however.

I have a feeling that the older version of the OS on the device while I was installing the apps initially might have caused an issue (it was the version of Android which didn't allow you to put apps on the SD card). Since updating it, I've moved apps to the SD card, but it hasn't really improved the situation a great deal.

The more I write here, the more I think I should probably reset it and give it another chance - you concur?
 
it does seam wrong that your mem is full on 2nd day...

yes.. 500mb does not seem large enough.. but the android apps are very small.

can you take a guess on how many apps you downloaded from the market?
less than 25?
less than 50?
less than 75?
over 100?

I have heard of a few (very few) have bad internal memory. and there is not enough good space to load much. I think you might have a bad phone. If you have loaded less than 25 (apps from market) and are getting low mem.. you might need a replacement phone!
 
It really is quite a pain. I have filled up my phone's space (all though not nearly as fast as you did) and I get that low on memory message all the time. I even had to uninstall a few apps since my phone wouldn't receive pictures from friends since the memory was close to full. One bit of advice I can offer is to download the following app:

App 2 SD (move apps to SD) - Android app on AppBrain

It helps to make it easy to spot which apps can be moved to the SD card. Google really needs to address this issue because I now have to watch what apps I download and therefor developers aren't getting my full attention (besides which, the developers really show just allow the move2SD card option on there apps). Good luck.
 
I think this is a case we can clear up before resorting to a handset swap.

While you have more RAM, you have half the ROM space as an Evo. Things probably got a little tangled when you tried to load LOTs at once - and HTC updates have been known to tangle things, occassionally (it's happened to me).

And my tangle, I mean the operating system cache and its data area.

So yes, you want to a factory reset - but all is not lost. Here are the steps to backup, reset and restore your phone.

You might have to pay for a backup program to do it the right / slick way, but I advise that anyway - phones get lost and broken - and backup is cheap.

http://androidforums.com/evo-4g-support-troubleshooting/141369-how-fix-froyo.html

Next - don't re-install all of your apps right away.

Instead, make sure you have these things installed first - Astro File Manager and SystemPanel Lite, both free in the Market.

With SPL, you can monitor running apps and memory usage.

With Astro, I'm going to suggest you make a strategy like this - take those apps you use least but still want around (a have a BUNCH of utilities that fall into this category - don't use 'em often, but when I do, I need 'em) - use Astro to make a separate (simpler) app backup to your SD card, and delete the extra, least used apps. When you want one, you can pull it in, use it, delete it when it's done and Bob's your uncle.

You can even put SystemPanel Lite into that category. ;)

And whatever you're doing - don't be running any automatic task killers. They are NOT your friend and only make the situation you're in right now even worse.
 
Mostly Harmless said:
It really is quite a pain. I have filled up my phone's space (all though not nearly as fast as you did) and I get that low on memory message all the time. I even had to uninstall a few apps since my phone wouldn't receive pictures from friends since the memory was close to full. One bit of advice I can offer is to download the following app:

App 2 SD (move apps to SD) - Android app on AppBrain

It helps to make it easy to spot which apps can be moved to the SD card. Google really needs to address this issue because I now have to watch what apps I download and therefor developers aren't getting my full attention (besides which, the developers really show just allow the move2SD card option on there apps). Good luck.
Click to expand...

Try the Astro strategy in my post above.

Also - this isn't Google's fault, as you've noted - it's up to the dev to make a move-worthy app. Google provided the capability for 2.2 - if a dev isn't keeping up, that's not Google's fault.

The container's only so big, even if you move apps to the SD card. The more you give Android to manage, the faster it'll fill up - until it overflows.

In my opinion.
 
yeah.. but... your opinion dont count around here!!! :P


btw.. great suggestion. I will be trying that out as well !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! :)
 
Try the above but it will only postpone your anguish. Once you have exhausted these options I am afraid root is the only option.

I know you don't want to hear that and I won't suggest it lightly.

However, your memory woes are then gone forever
 
Thanks for all the great responses! I'll definitely give them a go when I have some time today, and get back to you.

I sincerely hope there's nothing wrong with it, although I'm a little bothered I managed to fill up the memory so quickly...

Thanks again!
 
the_prof said:
Thanks for all the great responses! I'll definitely give them a go when I have some time today, and get back to you.

I sincerely hope there's nothing wrong with it, although I'm a little bothered I managed to fill up the memory so quickly...

Thanks again!
Click to expand...

the thing is, you only have a maximum of 148MB (despite what the specs say). This is for all your apps, app settings, app cache, Dalvik cache too.

Also HTC mail stores its data and cache here too, if you're using that. Also it appears contacts storage may be buggy. People have had contacts storage of upto 97MB (huge). They have got round thios by exporting to SD, wiping cache in Contacts storage and then re-importing it (or resyncing it)
 
it is a design oversight that htc didnt learn from with then hero etc
i expect they didnt change the model for data/app when google announced froyo and thought it would be similar to how the rooted version of a2sd+ worked
theyve learned their lessong with the desireZ and HD so meh.

root is not that bad and i have over 100 apps installed, some rather large and i have 98mb of internal free and 210mb of ext (a2sd+) storage free.

thing is though, out of all the apps i have, i only use a few of them so i question whether i need that many all the time.
how many of the apps do you actually use?
 
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