So, after managing to destroy my beloved Motorola Atrix with it's fingerprint scanner which no other phone seems to have had since, I've bought a second hand HTC Desire (original version) to see me through to the end of my contract in the summer.
Generally I'm happy enough with it, but one thing I'm finding crippling is the paltry 512MB internal storage space. Coming from my Atrix on which I constantly installed new apps for 2 years without it complaining once, I'm now in a position when after only sticking 3 or 4 essentials on, I triggered a low space warning and found I was down to only a few megs of internal storage remaining.
The handset was updated to Android 2.2 Froyo and so does support moving apps to the SD card, but this seems fundamentally broken in that not all apps will move and significant chunks seems to stay behind on the internal space anyway. It's let me squeeze a few more on but that's it.
The handset is locked to Orange who do seem to have filled the phone up with lots of their own bloatware and pointless game demos, all of which are installed as system apps and so can't be removed.
It looks like I can upgrade to Gingerbread by downloading the ROM from HTC's website, and my thinking is that this may save some space by ditching Orange's addons and hopefully better use of the SD card being made. Does anyone know:
* If generic HTC Gingerbread has a smaller footprint than Orange's Froyo?
* If the apps-on-SD support is any better in Gingerbread?
HTC Desire (original) - to Gingerbread or not to Gingerbread
Nocwathen wrote:* If generic HTC Gingerbread has a smaller footprint than Orange's Froyo?
* If the apps-on-SD support is any better in Gingerbread?
No
the best thing is probably to go for a full cyanogen reset and then use one of the little apps to partition to the SD card thus fooling the phone into thinking its internal memory is bigger than it is. It's a fudge but sadly due to the pathetic level of memory in the Desire its all that is really doable without the joys of daily cache cleaning.
"He has to be larger than bacon"
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Dr Lobster*
- Posts: 2123
- Joined: Sat 30 Aug, 2003 20.14
I can't answer your question specifically...I don't know how much you spent on the old Desire, but a colleague just got a Nexus 4, its a lovely phone for the money. Great value and the screen is super. Maybe it will be easier to just get a Nexus and go sim only when your contract runs out?
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Does this require rooting as that's something I'd like to avoid? I don't care about the 3 days of data I've accumulated on it and I consider myself technically competent to follow the directions but I've read so many reports of rooting going wrong for no obvious reason and if the phone gets bricked then I've just chucked £65 down the drain. Admittedly not an earth-shattering sum of money but I shelled it out for a phone to tide me over for a few months, not a few days.Pete wrote:the best thing is probably to go for a full cyanogen reset and then use one of the little apps to partition to the SD card thus fooling the phone into thinking its internal memory is bigger than it is. It's a fudge but sadly due to the pathetic level of memory in the Desire its all that is really doable without the joys of daily cache cleaning.
As stated above, 6500 great Britain pennies were spent on the Desire. I was seriously considering going for a 12 month sim only contract and keeping the Atrix to see if the industry could churn up anything that would wow me enough to part with it. It may be 2 years old and an overlooked handset by those who haven't had one but little touches like the fingerprint scanner and the dock which turned it into a brilliant bedside alarm clock (as well as turning it into a pseudo-computer running a full desktop Firefox browser and a credible media centre if you plugged it into your TV) made it pretty amazing and are not available on anything else new.Dr Lobster* wrote:I can't answer your question specifically...I don't know how much you spent on the old Desire, but a colleague just got a Nexus 4, its a lovely phone for the money. Great value and the screen is super. Maybe it will be easier to just get a Nexus and go sim only when your contract runs out?
I was thinking of getting an S4 when my contract runs out, maybe it is time to look at an unbranded Nexus and run Vanilla Android. If the old HTC I'm using now has taught me anything, it's that the customisations manufacturers and operators apply to Apply (read: "shit they bolt on top of what is already a very capable operating system in a futile attempt to stop Android handsets from becoming the generic devices which they largely already are at software level as an excuse for not actually developing hardware innovations to make their devices stand out") are more for their benefit than the end user - if I was just running Android rather than Android + HTC Sense + bloatware bundled by Orange than this thread may never have needed to exist.
I'm still using my HTC Desire, 3 years on. Can't believe I've had it that long. Processor in it is still adequate but as you know the issue is memory.
Mine is rooted and modified in a similar fashion to that mentioned by Pete, though I still have an HTC Gingerbread build on it rather than a CyanogenMod one.
Link2SD is the programme I used after rooting. It's worked for me, but friends tried the same process and didn't manage to get it to work so well for them.
Mine is rooted and modified in a similar fashion to that mentioned by Pete, though I still have an HTC Gingerbread build on it rather than a CyanogenMod one.
Link2SD is the programme I used after rooting. It's worked for me, but friends tried the same process and didn't manage to get it to work so well for them.