Get the most our of your Blackberry?
A couple of weeks ago, I received an email from S4BB about two new apps they had coming out that could help improve your Blackberry in two ways. One, by freeing up memory, the other by boosting your Battery life (which, while battery life on the BB isn’t as bad as say, an iPhone, it can get pretty short if you use a lot of apps). Needless to say, I was intrigued.
First up is MemoryBooster which is currently for sale for $8.99 until August 21st. According to the email, “MemoryBooster boosts your device speed by recovering wasted memory”. I figured, I’d install this bad boy, run it and no more hour glass. Well, that isn’t exactly the case.
The program installs like normal and places an icon in your downloads (or wherever) folder. From there, you open the app and you simply push a button. When running this application, I’ve freed anywhere from 4k to 6M of memory at one time. Something you would expect to help a great deal. Unfortunately, it does not free up used app memory. I asked S4BB about this and the reply I received was that it frees up Flash Memory. So if any of your programs uses Flash Memory to store temp information, this is a good way to recover that space. The best and perhaps only way, to free up App Memory is still a battery pull.
That being said, MemoryBooster takes up relatively little space and anything that helps with memory (even if its flash memory) is good in our book. Perhaps the only issue with it is the way in which is displays the counts and the fact that it isn’t always clear where the “free” memory the app displays is coming from. I would like to see it in Megabytes instead of listed the way it is, as 2M means more to me then 26173836.
BatterBooster is the other app. This one I was really hoping would live up to the promise of boosting my battery’s runtime. Unfortunately, I’m not sure I can say that it does. The program runs in the background (starts automagically on restart) and when asked about the technology behind it I received basically a rewording of the original email. I wasn’t certain how an application that’s running all the time on the device could actually extend the battery life instead of draining it. From experience, the more apps running, the shorter battery life, but I was willing to give it a try.
The first two days I noticed that I did not have to charge my phone as I usually did (when in the car, the phone is plugged in to the charger unless talking on it) but it may have been because I was using my desktop twitter, facebook and IM applications more then the phone. The more I used the phone, the more I noticed that the battery life was about where it was before I started using the application. Battery life isn’t terrible, but I wasn’t seeing the expected results from the app that I had hoped.
As with MemoryBooster, BatterBooster (also available for $8.99) had an interface but it isn’t much more then a bar graph showing battery life and a percentage. Perhaps even better would be a way to calculate battery life left on the current charge.
If you’re really looking for a way to extend your battery life, I’d actually go with something like the Seidio Innocell 2600mAh Extended Battery or an app like Radio Saver which actually turns off the radio on your device (meaning no calls or data coverage) when you’re in poor service areas. That’s more likely to extend your battery life.
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Tags: Applications, Battery Life, BatteryBooster, Blackberry, Free, Memory, MemoryBooster
