Xperia U and ICS

[Anonymous]

I updated my Xperia U to ICS very soon after the update became available. I've lived through all the various things that went wrong as a result, I ran repairs, all that stuff. As far as I can tell, the phone's okay. But performance is, in some situations, absolutely dreadful. In particular, the main reason I have a phone rather than an Android tablet: making and receiving phone calls. Making calls from the contacts list is s-l-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-w. Sometimes, a couple of minutes can pass before the phone actually responds to the instruction. Making calls without using the contact list is often a little faster but really -- this thing in my pocket is a PHONE. It should be able to make calls more quickly than I could walk to the person I'm calling, surely? If I look at the memory reporting bit for running apps, right now it's claiming 361Mb used, 27Mb free. The two biggest users of memory, according to the list, are Settings (27Mb) and Facebook (20Mb.) Does the fact that there's (apparently) a relatively limited pool of memory to run apps in contribute to the performance issues? If so, is there anything I can do to make the phone tidy up after itself a bit more aggressively, or can I sacrifice some storage into the pool available for running apps in? When I let the ICS upgrade happen, I did see a warning that performance might suffer a bit. I figured a small drop in performance would be okay, but this, really, is unacceptable. Is there anything I can do? Thanks for any suggestions anyone may have! ...this space unintentionally left blank

[perksie]

The 27Mb left on the phone is barely enough to keep it working, you may have to either get rid of some files or a few apps.

Then clear the phones cache and it should improve.

[Anonymous]

Which version of ICS is the phone running as there have been a couple of dodgy ICS firmware releases by Sony accross the Xperia range.

Latest for the Xperia U is Android version 4.0.4 with build number 6.1.1.B.1.10

[Anonymous]

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@perksie wrote:

The 27Mb left on the phone is barely enough to keep it working, you may have to either get rid of some files or a few apps.

Then clear the phones cache and it should improve.

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It's a 4Gb phone: of that 4Gb, I have a little over 1.5Gb free. The memory available for applications doesn't appear to relate to either of those totals.

(I have to say, when I bought it the chap in the O2 shop told me (a) it was an 8Gb phone and (b) I could add an SD card to it. I still think I should have taken it back when I found out he was mistaken. Bit late now, sadly.)

I'm not sure if I completely believe the numbers reported by diagnostics, but according to them:

RAM: Total 389MB Used 355KB

Internal (SDCard) Total 3.98GB Used 2.45GB

Internal (/data) Total 1.97Gb Used 844MB

Deleting files will increase space in the SDCard total. Removing apps MIGHT increase the available RAM but -- as I said in the original post -- the biggest memory footprint appears to belong to Facebook (ignoring Settings as I don't exactly have the option to remove it) and that was put there by Sony themselves, so I ought to be able to have the expectation that it's not going to cause problems.

Flushing the cache... I don't know enough about Android to be sure about this but surely that'll only have a very temporary effect anyway?

[Anonymous]

I'm running Android v4.04, it says. The build number... mine appears to be later than the one you quote: 6.1.1.B.1.54 According to Xperia Diagnostics, I have 389Mb RAM, of which only 355Kb is used. That seems unlikely, somehow -- I imagine the Kb is a mistyping of Mb.

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

The 27Mb of 'settings' is running because you are in settings to be able to see the report that you are reading.

When you exit settings that 27mb of RAM frees up again.

I am assuming that Facebook is part of the bloatware that comes pre-installed with the O2 Firmware so unless you root the phone to be able to delete system apps you're stuck with that one I'm afraid.

[Anonymous]

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@Anonymous wrote:

I am assuming that Facebook is part of the bloatware that comes pre-installed with the O2 Firmware so unless you root the phone to be able to delete system apps you're stuck with that one I'm afraid.

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Thanks -- so I discovered! I was able to uninstall updates, but not Facebook itself.

I HAVE managed to identify a few apps I can live without that occupy RAM. After removal, I now have about 100Mb free RAM and the phone seems quite a lot faster.

I also switched back to a standard Xperia theme -- I was using one of my own photos as wallpaper. Not sure if that's relevant or not... I kinda miss the personal touch so I'll probably experiment further.

By the way, in case anyone cares: there's an app called Nova Launcher that I use instead of the "normal" launcher. It doesn't seem to be implicated in my performance problems so I've breathed a sigh of relief and started using it again. I can recommend it to anybody!

I feel like I'm fumbling in the dark a bit here, though. Can anybody tell me if it's possible (like it used to be with Windows Mobile) to allocate more memory to RAM and less to storage? Or is that something else you either need to root your phone for (not while I'm in my 24-month contract/warranty period, thanks!) or is it just not possible?

[MI5]

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@Anonymous wrote:

Can anybody tell me if it's possible (like it used to be with Windows Mobile) to allocate more memory to RAM and less to storage? Or is that something else you either need to root your phone for (not while I'm in my 24-month contract/warranty period, thanks!) or is it just not possible?

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Unfortunately with Android the system partitions are written into the firmware. It is an irritation on ICS with lower spec phones which has been addressed in Jelly Bean - Should Sony ever release JB for your device it should help.

ps +1 for Nova launcher from me too....