I was up and working on my Samsung Galaxy SIII smartphone at 5am Thursday morning. It seems to be getting slower and slower and I wanted to speed it up. Yes, I know it’s old by today’s standards, but it is very reliable – never giving me any major problems.
One thing I do every so often is check if any unused apps which can be removed. Unfortunately, only apps you download and not the built-in ones can be removed. I would love to rip out many of the built-in apps I never use. I found an app from my credit union which has never worked right so it was removed. I never can understand Snapchat and have trouble using it so it was removed as well.
Another thing which might be slowing the smartphone down is file accumulation. All the videos, pictures, downloads and emails over the years could be making it sluggish. To make it easier to see all the folders, my desktop computer was brought into action. Using the USB cable, I connected the smartphone to my Linux desktop computer which has dual monitors. I browsed the smartphone file structure looking for files to delete or move to my computer.
My smartphone has two main areas to save files: the 64GB SD card and the 16GB internal phone storage. The SD card has plenty of free space and isn’t the issue. The internal smartphone storage was the problem because it only had 1.7GB free. A folder was found which looked like a good start: Phone\Download and contained all the files I had downloaded from emails and web sites over the years. For some reason I couldn’t open the files directly on the smartphone, but I could copy them to my computer and then open them. Several PDFs, pictures, videos and test files were in the download folder. I saved many of them to my server, dropbox,and to the smartphone’s SD card. Then they were deleted from the phone\download folder. Doing this freed up about 2 GB on the phone and did speed it up some.
Stay tuned for other smartphone tips.