I think I might be one of the few people I know who does not have a “smart” phone. There is a good reason for this : when I am not at my computer I don’t want to read my email. If my phone beeped or vibrated every time I received an email, it would do so about fifty times a day. I’m not an avid facebook user so I have no desire to update my status on the go (or pretty much ever). If I want to listen to music, I have an mp3 player. If I want to take a picture, I have a camera. If I want to play a game, I have several game consoles and I don’t feel the need to have constant entertainment any time I need to wait for something. I have a GPS device in my car if I get lost, and I have a laptop to surf the web. Overall, I just feel that one device with all of these capabilities typically doesn’t do each individual thing as well as a device designed for a single purpose. As the technology advances, I’m aware this will not be the case but for now… I’m not convinced. However, I concede that a lot of people don’t want to carry around more than one device or may be concerned with having access to email, facebook, etc. all the time, so I understand its appeal.
Plus, people love gadgets. They race to the store to buy the new iPhone or iPad or pretty much any device someone puts and ‘i’ in front of the day it comes out. And if buying the new i-whatever makes you happy than I say go for it.
That being said, I wasn’t surprised that I got a question about the Android phone. There was a compliant that over time, this phone slows down. While it was difficult for me to find information on exactly why this happens, I did find out some tricks you can do in order to speed things up. From that, I inferred some reasons. So, I may be wrong about the why but I do think that these suggestions are reasonable things to try.
The first problem is that there is a cache partition on your phone. This means that Android’s operating system keeps around copies of web pages around in order to, in theory, speed up the web browser. You might also download files that you thought were temporary that actually are not. While this makes perfect sense (see my blog post about google), if you have such a small amount of hard disk space, you start to lose the benefits.
Another possible solution is to check to see if there are a lot of background processes running on your phone. A nice feature about the Android phone is that you can leave open several apps at a time. But not only does this slow down the phone as the number of apps you have running increases, you also run into the problem of decreased battery life. So, what can you do about it? Well, there are several apps out there; the most recommended one was something called ‘Task Killer’. Such apps will show you what processes are running and make it easy to kill unwanted processes. And check to see if your GPS or any other app is set to constantly update. This will most certainly decrease speed not to mention battery life.
It would also be a good idea to check for operating system updates. Your slow down may be caused by some problem with previous operating system versions that were addressed in an update. As a programmer, I’m sympathetic that it’s really hard to catch every problem with your software until people use it and start to complain about problems. So, I’m sure the good people that work on the Android operating system work hard every day to make your experience with their product better. Some updates unfortunately may be detrimental to the speed; often operating systems become bloated by all the new complicated “cool” widgets the programmers design.
You might also try buying a new battery. Devices sometimes are designed to slow down as battery life gets low and if your battery is old and loses charge quickly you may experience decreased performance more often.
And finally there is an issue with cell phone reception. Some areas have better coverage than others and there really isn’t too much you can do about that except move to where ever you get better coverage.
The bottom line? Before you go out and buy a new phone, give these things a try. it might just save you money and the hassle of getting a new phone.