Breathing Life into your Low end Android Phones

Low end Android phones don’t mean they are low quality android phones. They simply have fewer features as compared to the other phones in the market. They can also be called as entry-level android phones. I have seen people throwing (or selling) away their phones just because of some missing features. You can get almost all features like that other high-end devices.

Problems with Low end Android phones:

Biggest problem with the low-end phones is their memory.

The internal memory of the android phone is crucial for installing apps.

Many apps get installed only in the internal memory. For example, the most famous “WhatsApp” messenger app has more than 100 million downloads. This app uses 14.31MB (version 2.10.750) of the internal memory. Over this the data uses up some tens of megabytes of your internal memory.

Let’s take an example of one of the most selling low-end android phone- Samsung Galaxy Y S5360. The phone has internal memory of 190MB. That number is way less than the phones coming up these days. Google’s inbuilt apps or bloatwares use up considerable amount of memory.

Apps like Maps (10MB), Play Store (10MB), Quick Office (6MB), Gmail (3MB), Youtube (3MB), Google Search, News, Weather, Voice Search & other settings could not be uninstalled from the internal memory. These take up around 50MB or even more. Other apps like WhatsApp eat up close to 30MB; you’re left with 110MB. Then you will like to add some games to your list- Angry Birds (40MB), Fruit Ninja (30MB), etc. Social Apps like Facebook takes around 10MB & Twitter takes up 3MB. Go on calculating these & you will cross 190MB.

Root Permissions Denied

Second problem would be RAM of the phone. Low-end phones have sufficient RAM to run 2-3 small apps but not more than that. You will not feel multi-tasking if you run some high-end apps.

Third problem would be inability of some apps to run on the low-end phones. Galaxy Y won’t play games like Temple Run & Subway Surfers.

Fourth problem is the upgrade in operating system of the phones. Galaxy Y can be updated to Android 2.3.6. You can never get the taste of ICS or JB phones.

Solution to the Problems:

The best & the only solution to these problems is rooting your Android phone. Rooting gives you full administrator control to access your android device. Cnet has given a brief explanation on “What is Rooting?” Rooting technique varies for each & every device. There are many forums & communities dedicated to rooting.

There are many websites who say that rooting could break your phone. Don’t listen to those sites. Even I was scared of rooting my phone. It took me 2 days to build up the COURAGE to root my device (Some of it came from my friend Harshwardhan). But, it took only 2 minutes to root the device. That was very very easy. Even unrooting your device takes 2 minutes (in case you want to visit a service centre).

Rooted Android Phones

Solution to problem 1:

After rooting your phone you will find a list of number of apps that you never installed. You can remove bloatwares & other such unwanted apps using Titanium Backup or Gemini App Manager on your rooted phone. Just uninstall apps that you don’t want & you will get rid of the used space by those apps.

Warning: Some of those could be system apps, so be careful while uninstalling the apps.

You can also increase internal memory of your phone using Link2SD. Link2SD moves apps like WhatsApp (which are meant to run on internal memory) to SD card. You can create a partition on your memory card which will be treated as internal memory. For example, Galaxy Y could be given additional memory upto 1GB on the SD card. So no problem of low internal memory & you can enjoy many more apps. Easy tutorials are available for following these methods.

Solution to problem 2:

You cannot increase RAM for your device. Instead you can give some virtual space on SD card known as “Swap area”. Also, removing bloatwares will surely free RAM which they used.

Solution to problem 3:

You can play games like Temple Run 2 & Subway Surfers by downloading it externally. Download the apk file & install the games from SD card. Also using custom ROMs of ICS or JellyBlean Blast could help solving the compatibility issue.

Solution to problem 4:

Don’t worry if there is a new version of Android OS in the market. You can install custom ROMs of those android versions. CyanogenMod is the most widely used custom ROM with around 6 million downloads. The number is increasing exponentially.

There are number of different ROMs available. Some could be named as- Parandroid, AOSP, AOKP, MIUI, Hyperion, Liquid Smooth, SlimICS, etc. Each & every ROM has different features. Some are built for ICS, some for JB; some give better battery life, some give better UI. Also, procedure of flashing ROM depends upon different models. Search ROMs available for your model, check out the procedure given & follow the instructions properly. Some ROMs do have bugs so you can always flash other ROM on the device.

There are some RISKS while doing some of the above procedures to your device. The most common risk would be “bricking the phone”. This usually happens if you do not follow proper instructions. Don’t Worry! You can always flash Stock ROM (Manufacturers ROM) back in your device using ODIN on a laptop or pc & some specific procedure.