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how many apps is too many apps, should i switch?

seanjo5705

Lurker
Jan 16, 2010
1
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my eris has completely crashed twice know, requiring me to restore it to factory settings twice within the first two weeks ive gotten it. this is very irritating and everyone ive asked says im either using or downloading too many apps. Ive used smart phones before but none so heavily reliant on apps. Ive used advanced taskiller and all that but the phone continues to freeze and then have to rip the battery out and start all over like i pulled it out the box. I' am considering upgrading to the motorola droid given its higher processing speed and google NAV. Any suggestions?
 
Take it easy on the apps. Try the phone out with none installed for a day, then go slowly. One or two per day, tops. This will allow you to make sure the apps are working properly and not causing issues with eachother and/or the phone. Also, try to not install a task manager, just to try it. You'll be surprised. I haven't used one for about 2 weeks now and my phone runs like a champ.

But hey, the Eris isn't for everyone. If you try out the Droid and like it better, then upgrade. It's all personal preference. But the Droid would probably do the same thing to you if you overload it, so for your sanity's sake, take it slow!
 
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my eris has completely crashed twice know, requiring me to restore it to factory settings twice within the first two weeks ive gotten it. this is very irritating and everyone ive asked says im either using or downloading too many apps. Ive used smart phones before but none so heavily reliant on apps. Ive used advanced taskiller and all that but the phone continues to freeze and then have to rip the battery out and start all over like i pulled it out the box. I' am considering upgrading to the motorola droid given its higher processing speed and google NAV. Any suggestions?

Do you know roughly how many apps you had DL'ed each time you ran in to problems?

When you did the FR (factory reset), did you do it from the menus with a live phone (Settings->Security->Factory data reset), or were you forced to do it with the cold-start factory reset (Phone off, press Vol-Down, Send, and Power/End)?

Just curious... what exactly were the symptoms you were observing that made you decide to do a FR? The freezing? Something else, such as HTC Sense crashing immediately on reboot?

As far as the question "how many apps are too many?" goes, there are at least two good answers:

- it only takes one poorly written app to make your phone misbehave.
-or-
- so many (good apps) that there is very little system memory remaining


You can observe the amount of free system memory (built-in flash memory) by going to

Settings -> SD card & phone storage.

(Look at the "Available Space" at the bottom of the page)


You certainly need to keep it above zero - but since it is very hard to predict how much system memory various apps and system processes will use for their own private data stores, you should be conservative - personally, I would feel uncomfortable if I saw it get below 20 Mb.

I would take bjf88's advice to heart - add apps slowly, so that you will be able to notice if something dramatic changes; hopefully uninstalling will correct the problem (although there are reports on this board of apps that caused problems that uninstalls would not correct).

It is possible that you have a unit with defective hardware - unfortunately, about the only way you can be sure that that is the case is to run the thing using only stock applications for a week or so to see if the problem still crops up - take it back and get it exchanged for a new unit before your 30 days are up if that is the case.

eu1
 
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It's not the number of apps you have, nor is it the architecture of the Eris ... I've got close to 50 downloaded apps on mine, and it runs great, and I'm not using a task killer.

Erisuser1 has given very good advice ... and the key question is whether those factory resets were really essential. All in all, I think that if your Eris is forcing repeated factory resets, you've either got a defective unit (all in all, not too likely), or you've got a buggy app. And either of those things are just as likely to happen on the Moto.
 
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Menu > Settings > Applications > Manage applications, and uninstall from there.

Start by uninstalling some that are huge (like the 40 Year Old Virgin Soundboard you downloaded that takes up an ugly 7MB) or some that you don't use (like the Illusionist).

The simplest might be to uninstall the most recent ones you installed. That could work as well, possibly.
 
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