Problem with old Android Phone

[gabgab23]

Hi guys,
I've been having problems with an old phone of mine. It's a T-Mobile ZTE Concord still running 2.3.7. I have a 4 GB SD Card that's only had 500MB used, but whenever I try to download apps, it always tells me that I don't have enough memory. I suspect this is because my "internal" memory has only 21 mb left. However, I only started with about 100~ (I think), making my situation rather ridiculous in that I can't download more than 7-10 apps. Does anybody have a solution for this? Thanks,
gabgab23

 

[gabgab23]

I have also moved most of the apps I can to the SD Card.

 

[Hadron]

I'm sure it's your internal storage. I'd expect the problem to start when you have 10% left on a GingerBread device (at least that's my experience).

App data (user apps and system apps) also live in internal storage, so cleaning app caches might help temporarily. May be worth checking no app is storing a vast volume of data. Note that moving apps to sd only moves part of the installed app and does not move app data.

If no obvious data hog can be found and clearing caches isn't enough, to do more you may have to root the phone, which gives you additional options.

 

[gabgab23]

Wait, so if I read your reply correctly, what this means is that the size of the SD Card really doesn't matter in my case because the amount of internal storage I have is so minuscule, correct? Is there a way to increase internal storage?

 

[Hadron]

The size of the SD card doesn't matter much for this, because you will almost certainly run out of internal space before you fill the card.

There are tricks to effectively increase internal space, such as creating a linux-formatted partition on the card and moving apps to there (including bits that aren't normally moved, such as the dalvik cache), with a link to make this look to the phone like it's part of the internal memory. On some phones, and with some ROMs, you can even repartition the internal memory, freeing up unused system space to be used by you instead, though whether that's possible with the Concord I don't know (I think it unlikely, as this device won't have had a large developer community).

As you might have guessed from the level of jargon in that description, the phone needs to be rooted to do this type of thing. Rooting, as well as warranty-voiding, is device-specific, so I can't really advise on how to do it for this phone. However, this post has a link which might help if you want to do that.

If you do, and if it works, then the simplest thing is probably to see whether an app called Link2SD (from the Play Store) can then help you with your storage problem. That allows you to move apps to a partition on your card, similar to what I mentioned above. The advantage is that you wouldn't have to find a custom ROM that supports the feature, which may help as I'm not sure there will be many ROMs for this one.

 

[bubkusjones]

And once you get it rooted, here's an instructional for setting up Link2SD
How to Partition SD Card and Use Link2SD in any Android Phone with Screenshots

Note, this will wipe your SD Card.

 

[jefboyardee]

It’s possible you could Magically Create Space.

 

[funkylogik]

Lol i used to roll back to the old market to save space and on froyo there was an app you could freeze to stop it from updating