Managing Memory on your Smartphone

Permit me to get a bit nostalgic first. There used to be a time, when Nokia 3310s ruled the roost. When mobile phones were exactly what they claimed to be i.e. a portable phone, with some texting facilities. And then somebody introduced the colour screen. And then a camera. A QWERTY keyboard appeared on the market for those upmarket businessmen. Soon, one thing led to another, and phone’s became much more than just mere phones.

So, now, we’ve got Symbian phones, running the S60 platform. Although a widely used platform, it’s still a bit kludgey, and could definitely do with some performance optimisation. But one of the big plus points for S60 is the number of applications available for it. So, if you’ve got a phone with a powerful enough processor and enough RAM, it can be like a small handheld computer, mainly because of S60′s native support for multi-tasking.

Now, thing is, I’ve noticed that over time, when you install stuff, and uninstall stuff, and surf the web, the phone memory tends to get a bit cluttered. Now, this is a problem for most people, even for me, with my 5230 with 88MB of internal memory. Only 59MB is actually available from the time you switch on the phone. Which can be a pain to manage sometimes.

Thankfully, there’s a fairly simple solution. Firstly, move all of your non-essential files to the memory card. This includes videos, photos and music. Also, open your inbox and delete any messages with attachments, such as MP3 songs you might have received over Bluetooth. Even after you save them to your memory card, the files will remain in your inbox and eat up the memory.

Next, open the phone’s menu, and navigate to File Manager. For S60v5 phones like the 5800XM and 5230, the path is Applications > Office > File Manager. Once here, click on Backup, which should be in the Options menu. This will create a backup of all your phone memory data on your memory card.

Now, reset your phone, by going to the keypad when in standby mode, and typing *#7370#. This will hard reset your phone and erase all data from your phone memory. Your memory card will remain untouched, but if it was password protected a while ago, you’ll need to remember that password to be able to use the memory card after formatting your phone.

Once you’re done resetting. Simply head over to the same place where you backed up, but this time, select Restore. You should select all the options, except Files, since you’ve already taken care of the files in the phone memory, by moving them to the memory card.

After this, you’ll find that somewhere around 50MB should be left. Now, proceed to reinstall your applications, but make sure you install them to the memory card, and not to the phone memory.

Apart from this, even formatting your memory card isn’t such a bad idea. Just make sure you’ve copied everything you need to your PC first, and only then proceed to format the card. Then, you can selectively copy stuff back.