Quick and easy tips for a faster Android

Posted: Monday February 22 2010 at 1:02 am

The Android operating system is a fantastic solution for mobile devices today. It offers great limitless possibilities and great flexibility to developers interested in working on the platform. Such limitless possibilities do come with a price. Many users suffer from frequent slowdowns and annoying “forces closes” that hinder on the Android experience. Here is my attempt to provide quick and easy tips for a more responsive and faster Android experience on any mobile devices using the Google system.

Keep the home screen as clean as possible. The more widgets and shortcuts you put on the home screen, the more resource it will need and also take longer to launch the home screen. What widgets should you avoid? Well you can always use your logic on this one. Small widgets like a quick Bluetooth switcher will not take too many resources but fancy widgets with animation will. I see many people filling their 3 pages with shortcuts and widgets they do not really use often, keep them out!

Avoid using assigned pictures to contacts as much as possible. This goes for any app that could view pictures of your contact. The obvious is the Android dialer; you can easily turn off contact pictures. This alone shaved off a few seconds of loading every time I tried calling someone. You can do the same for many applications like Handcent to make it load much faster.

Download a task manager. Regularly closing unnecessary applications will not only make your device more responsive but also boost battery life by a notch. Android natively does this when multiple applications are running but using a task manager makes it much better. I recommend Advanced Task Manager that is available in both premium and free edition in the market. You can assign auto-close and have an exclusion list for applications that you want to leave open.

For rooted phones:

Clear your cache using Cache Mate. It is available for a low price on the market, it will clear your cache fast and easy from most applications that uses a cache. You can also do this from the settings menu but it is so slow that it is not worth the waste of time.

Maximize the CPU power using SetCPU, available for a fee in the market. Most Android phones are under clocked by manufacturers for various reasons that I do not comprehend. This application will enable you to maximize the potential by pushing the CPU to its limit. It sounds dangerous but I never had problems with it on my phone. It will affect your battery life but not as much as you think it will.

That is all for now, here are my quick tips for a smoother Android experience. I will update this guide when more solutions come up.

Quick and easy tips for a faster Android

Smarter Than Dumb