I am quite a heavy smartphone user and I have a lot of people that I regularly e-mail. While Android phones are robust and functional in many ways, they have the unfortunate limitation of requiring that many parts of the OS and many software components reside directly in the phone’s storage memory. This is not a problem for light users with only a few applications installed, but for heavy users, it’s pretty common to scramble to find a way to free up some space so that you can download your latest mail.
One of the most common causes of memory shortages on Droids is large contact lists. As the phones default to syncing with Google accounts, this can result from lots of e-mail contacts, even if no numbers are stored for those contacts. Why should contacts be an issue? Surely storing an e-mail address and a phone number for each person is not much of a space consumer! True, but Droids also download profile images for each contact. When all of my contact images were synced with my phone, more than half of the system storage memory was consumed by pictures of my contacts.
What is the solution? You can either manually go through your contact list and delete all of the profile images associated with your contacts, which is feasible, but tedious, or you can use an app to do it. One popular app available for free in the Android marketplace is “Contact Picture Remover,”
Contact Picture Remover will delete all your contact-associated images (you want to back these up first if you have any you care about) and free up a whole lot of space. The only tricky part is that your phone will resync and download the images again unless you turn syncing off. My solution is to sync periodically, turn off syncing and then delete all of my contact images.
Now, my Droid runs quickly and I can install all of the apps that I want!