Benchmark results from Quadrant Standard Edition
Most of us have experienced it at one time or another: we purchase a piece of electronic equipment after investing a good deal of time in picking just the right one, and inside of six month’s it’s “obsolete.” A new model has come out, that’s faster/has more storage space/has more features/whatever. Oftentimes—much to our consternation—it’s even less expensive than the device we just bought.
Sometimes, too, we find that, as we become more and more familiar with a device, we push it ever harder, and we end up stretching its limits. How many of us, for instance, find ourselves periodically deleting things from our smartphones, in order to free up space? It can get really frustrating, especially if we find ourselves having to choose between apps that we actually use.
Once in a while, there are ways around the difficulty, and not all of them involve selling or trading the device, or resigning oneself to sticking with its limitations. For those who are a bit adventurous and reasonably confident in their ability to follow technical directions, there may be workarounds that make it possible to get more life out of “older” hardware.
To take an example: T-Mobile’s MyTouch 3G Slide came out in the spring of 2010. It was a very nice mid-range device, running Android 2.1. Unfortunately, it had very little user-accessible internal memory, and that particular version of Android didn’t allow moving applications to the microSD card (apps2sd). As promised, T-Mobile did eventually update the device to 2.2 (which does allow such moving), but they took forever to do it. The update didn’t arrive until early 2011, and even then, it wasn’t an over-the-air update. The user had to download it via computer, and run the update manually. Oh, and the process required a Windows PC—users of other OSes were out of luck.
That’s where the adventure begins. Having grown frustrated and impatient waiting for the official update, I took the plunge and rooted the phone, and installed a ROM (Android version) that included apps2sd (I went with Cyanogenmod’s ROM, but there are others available, depending on one’s phone model; interested readers might want to familiarize themselves with sites such as The Unlockr or the forums at XDA developers).
That helped a lot, but I was still running into storage issues. Some applications can’t be moved to the SD card, either because they include widgets or because their developers haven’t enabled the feature. What I learned as I did a bit more investigation was that it isn’t just applications that can eat memory; the data they create can, too, and that data is often stored in the phone’s internal memory.
With a script called data2ext (I’ve linked to the version for Cyanogenmod, since it’s the one I used), however, that data can be moved to an extension on the SD card. Following the directions at the link above, I set up that script on the phone. I also overclocked the phone’s processor (that is, forced it to run faster) using an application called SetCPU. The results were fairly impressive (see the lead image).
I’ll offer the usual disclaimer: rooting the phone voided my warranty. (By the time I started fussing with data2ext and SetCPU, though, the phone was already a year old and thus out of warranty, anyway.) But with a little tinkering, I ended up with a phone that had the storage space I needed, was faster than it had been before, and competed respectably with phones that had later release dates.
What tips do you have for getting new or longer life out of “older” devices? Let us know in the comments.
[Creative Commons licensed image by the author.]
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