Keep your Android phone running quick

While we wait for the public beta of everyone’s soon-to-be favourite home replacement, let’s look at ways to speed up your phone. A lot of people experience lag when using Android, so here’s a few tips for keeping your phone light weight and zippy fast. (These are more for G1, Magic users etc – not so much for Droid and newer phones with those kick-ass processors.)

• Sweeter Home: Remove all icons and widgets from your stock home screen. The app Home Switcher makes changing between homes nice and simple.

• Backup then delete your SMS/MMS messages, often. Use SMS Backup or something similar to backup your SMS. Delete all threads. Do this every 1 or 2 weeks.

• Be careful with wallpaper filesize. The reason the android default wallpaper app puts horrible looking compression on your wallpaper is to keep the file size down. If you use a background app (like the excellent Wallpaper Set and Save) make sure your source files aren’t too big. Anything under 100KB should be ok.

• Those apps you don’t use? Delete ‘em. Keep your app drawer trim. That app you downloaded last month and thought it was cool but haven’t used since? Get rid of it. A particular app may be killing your battery usage or CPU also, so trial and error removing certain apps to see if your phone gets faster once it’s been removed.

• Those widgets you don’t use? Delete ‘em. Clock widgets are a particularly bad offender, often running in the background even if they’re not active. Only keep widgets installed that you actually run.

• Change update frequencies. Lengthen the time periods for RSS apps, Twitter apps, weather apps etc to update. No brainer.

• Use a task killer. you shouldn’t have to rely on this too heavily, but it’s handy once in a while. There are oodles of recommended free and paid task managers.

• Restart your phone. You should have done this with your dumb phone every few months anyway. try it every 1 or 2 weeks with Android.