Saturday 6 September 2014

Speed Up Android Phone

Like my windows computer, I found out that through time my android phone lags in performance from time to time. Although this play up is just seldom, it is annoying to be kept waiting for response specially when you are at an important activity. Most of the time I work around this by pressing the restart button only to find out, it added more idle time for the device to reboot! I should have spent a little time asking sensible questions why the phone is behaving that way.

And here are the answers why  my android phone (Note 3) slows down.

Background applications running


These background applications could be vital to the phone's performance. It could also be just an unnecessary weight that is wasting the processing power and dragging its performance into a snail paced.

Opened apps


The rule is, the more applications opened, the more the phone becomes sluggish. This is because the phone's processing power and memory are overwhelmed when applications are running at the same time. You can see these apps even if the active apps indicator is showing zero by pressing the home button until the list shows(1)

Solution is to end these by swiping the application to either to the left(2) or to the right.



Widgets


Widgets are great and useful but there is also a dark side about them. Especially those that get their contents from the internet. And not only that, they download and update themselves automatically as well. News and weather widgets are very popular and could be a very reason to slow down your phone as well as they .  are usually pre shipped with the factory settings of the phone.

The solution here is to avoid widgets that pull fresh   contents over the internet by removing it. To disable this, just stick your fingers on the middle of the  widget(3) until the bin(4) appears and just drag and drop it there.



Free Applications


Who needs a paid for applications when you have free alternatives? Or are these free apps actually free? This is not easy to answer.

In a developers point of view, an application even if it's free, can generate income by allowing advertisers to place their products with the application. The more users, the more advertisers and advertisement exposure. This means more money to be generated. As this adverstisements (5) are dynamic, they pull their contents as well over the internet.  Here is where the problem lies when they consume computing resources of the phone, not only for the application to run but for showing adverts (5) whilst it is running.

The solution here  is to try to limit the free apps in your phone. It is also a good practice to turn off the Wi-Fi or data tariff (6) if the application allows you whilst using the app.



Bloated launcher


The Samsung's built in launcher(touchwhiz, 8) has many enhancement rolled on its sleeves. Most users find this entertaining but in my point of view, this just slows down the phone's performance. If you are practical thinking and do not fancy much like animations and other tantalizing antics(7), then finding a slimmer launcher can boost performance. I have tried Zeam Launcher and I liked it.

You can download it from the Play store. Just search Zeam Launcher. You can change your default launch application to Zeam by going to Settings>General>Default Applications>Home>then choose Zeam(8). The result is a slimmer version of everything, comparing the previous launcher(7) with the Zeam interface (9) may not look impressive, but if you go through your applications using Zeam(9) I can testify that it is faster.

 You can always switch to the original one by following above path if this is too plain for you.






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