Let's face it, you have a blackberry which means:
- Your employer forces you to use it
- You just hate the kiddy phones (read iphone and clones)
- You love it, you try out every application that gets reviewed on Crackberry and unsuccessfully try to make it replace your laptop/desktop. But then, you do kind of succeed one step at a time and then you give yourself a smug look in front of the mirror.
If you are the no 3 kind, you would definitely understand the problem I am talking about (Because I am the no. 3 kind too!). I try out almost every BB app that floats around. Sometimes, I like them and use them, but most of the times I install an application, try it out and then just forget about it. This has made my phone worse than a Windows XP box : it's slow and it drains battery like someone is actually sucking it out of it with a vacuum cleaner. One other reason my phone's battery drains quickly is that I have wifi always on by default. Although, the main reason I do that is to increase battery life (3g modems typically suck up a lot of power), the end result is probably what I wanted to avoid in the first place although I will never ever admit that. So, in the end, starting with a full charge in the morning, I am almost out by the time I get home around evening.
With most applications running on Blackberries, unless you don't specifically exit the application, the application will just run in the background. That's a major pain and can make things really slow. Quickpull can be a good passive solution for such problems. Its approach is simple, it simulates a battery pull every day (or night) at a specified time. That kills all those nasty background processes! The only downside is the long wait before your phone boots back up. So, the time for the reboot has to be set carefully!
There is yet one more impressive application : Memory Booster . Unfortunately, it's a paid app but it does a pretty good job of what it claims to do. Just open it up and click on "boost memory" and it's gonna do its magic to free up some memory. It has also a nice graphical memory map option that shows memory used and java objects in a bar graph. What I like most about it is that it doesn't require a reboot! : very useful to quickly free up some memory when you are trying to open your calendar for example but all you see is a busy icon. |
The last application that I am going to mention is SmartWifi. Unfortunately, that's a paid app too but it diligently remembers to turn off your phone wifi on your behalf. Add a wifi location to its list (such as your home) and it will turn it back on once you are home. That does save a lot of battery that would normally go waste on wifi scanning in unwanted places.
So, if your story is somewhat similar to mine, take note of these three apps : Quickpull, SmartWifi and Memory Booster. There's a fair chance that they will make your BB life a little better if not perfect.
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