THE LONGER YOU HAVE a phone, the slower it runs. But with a little ruthlessness, I think you can restore speed on your handset.
I have several handsets to maintain and because each operating system (iOS, Symbian, Android and Windows Phone) synchronises so easily over the air, there are all sorts of cached data buried in crevices on the phones. So I have to take our my Deletrius Wand and magically remove scraps that get in the way of fast phone operations. The biggest culprit is image files. The phones sync image and video files so effortlessly to my laptop and the cloud so I tend to forget about media files. I have set up processes whereby I need to manually remove the images and videos from my handsets. Because my phones are my cameras, I have at least 10 MB of image files to clean from each my phones' memory banks every week. Even though the Sony Xperia Arc keeps its images on its SD card and not on main memory, the Android file manager accounts for thousands of images on the handset. Watching that happen provides me an incentive to NOT offer the phone 32 GB of SD memory.
As much as I want to remove active content from the front of the phone's screens, it's that feature that makes the phones so handy in the first place. My office mail bubbles up onto the Nokia E7's front screen and onto the Lumia 800's main tiles. I know that if I confine the mail to an app, the phones run faster but I want intelligent screens. For that reason, I've killed fancy interactive wallpaper and processor-intensive launchers. I also have app discipline and I've no hestitation to kill applications I don't want to run in the background. But the problem is many apps do more than provide info--they listen to gestures, location, and to your contacts' activities behind the scenes. Running an app today is tantamount to running a sophisticated multi-threaded process.
I'll spend the middle two weeks of December clearing out my phones' memories, planning to enter 2012 with snappier handheld dashboards.
My main phone is the Nokia E7. I use iOS to listen to audio and notifications and calendar alerts. I use a Sony Xperia Arc to snap document files and to view premium Evernote items. The Lumia 800 is just entering the mix and once I can pull essential dashboard items into active Windows Phone tiles, it will become my phone of 2012.
