Avoiding 'Memory' errors on a Symbian OS smartphone

Steve, your links wrong for the AAS mobile site, you missed the .com it should be www.allaboutsymbian.com/mobile or http://mobile.allaboutsymbian.com/

Install NSysInfo

Certificate expired.

(N95)

@ DKlaus

Set the phone date to 2006 and then install. No expired certificate errors. After installation, set the phone again to current date.

The biggest problem with memory is definitely the web browsing. This hold true for especially the N80 and N95 users who have got low RAM!

The problem however - is not really with the RAM, but with how the S60 web Browser application. What I have noticed is that this application is the most "bully" of all apps on the phone and tends to use a FIXED amount of RAM (usually associated with the maximum amount of available memory on a "clean" phone) rather than asking "how much RAM have I got left to use?"

I have seen quite a few bugs in the Browser that supports this theory-

1) If you have any application preloaded (eg Roadsync) and is in memory, the Web application will close off any other app without warning. Any attempts at the app reloading (such as Roadsync that reloads from a service once every 2-3 minutes), then you will most likely encounter out of memory errors.

2) Web browser can not only close other apps, but there are no safeguards to protected memory pages that is currently in use by other applications or even the OS. This means that the web app can corrupt memory used by other applications including the S60 shell. I have had many instances whereby the web app will "out of memory" and then kill off my themes and icons on the shell leaving a very basic icon set. A reboot is needed for the phone to function correctly again - but now defaulting back to the original themes selection.

3) Memory is used extremely badly in the web browser. I say this because in comparison to Opera 4 (which also features full desktop style rendering) uses memory much more efficient (and is also a J2ME app!). Yes, Opera does "cheat" by using a pre-rendered forward proxy to scale images down, but Nokia CAN do a similar service as well for their browsers to pre-render and shrink images down to a managable size.

4) The ONLY time when you can run Web Browser without ANY memory problems really is when a phone is brand new or has been flashed recently clearing out all applications. Even the slightest first installation of another app (eg Roadsync or even WorldMate) that eats up 1-2MB of memory, then it will cause memory problems.

Having said all this, the physical memory is definitely an issue - but the other thing of concern is a lack of a swap file. If a proper virtual RAM exists, then a lot of these out of memory issues will go away as background applications can get shifted to the slower virtual memory leaving the fast main memory for foreground apps like Web Browser.

The Internal "Safari" based Browser is fantastic - only if you dont install anything and just use the phone to surf the net!!

Until they resolve these issues, I am afraid that I will continute to use Opera 4 instead as this is the only real browser alternative that does a similar job without memory issues.

Honoustly: Telepathic!

I asked the same question today
in another forum.

Over there I also "preconcluded"
that also the 8GB will cause pro-
blems for me in the long run.

Very interesting though. Thanks.

DKlaus wrote:Certificate expired.

(N95)

Set your date to 18 jan 2007. Install. Set date back. Voil�..

Thanks Steve for this article. You are someone who sees that the glass is not half empty but half full. I am very proud of my E70 and in the past 2 years I encountered only a couple times that message. I must admit I wanted to change this phone the next day I bought it because Adobe gave me a memory full error on a 5 MB pdf. I was so annoyed, but then I discovered Pdf+. My error issues with pdfs are gone. The browser, is cool fancy and whatever, but the memory allocation has been improved with the two firmware revisions they launched. I use opera mobile and avoid surfing landscape. I totally forgot that my phone is "under ramed 😃 ". I never have those messages anymore. I am tempted to purchase the E90 but I am afraid I will shelve a bundle for something I wont use more than my e70. Should I wait for the E70i? 😃 Get the E90? Wait till next year when Nokia will put some decent RAM in their smartphones?

This article is a good one on a practical level. Kudos for that.

However, what should not be missed is that this article is also an indictment of Nokia/Symbian. go around trumpeting that these are phones they sell are "multitasking" devices, "mutimedia computers", "mobile web device" etc...............Okay, fine - well how about making a product that actually DOES what you claim without crashing? Its a bit silly to claim all that when you basically cant have your web browser and a java app open without freezing the device!

Someone should take this article to the Avertising Standards Authority in a decent country and sue Nokia on the back of these findings - or at least stop them from continuing to lie to customers.