Make Your T-Mobile Pocket PC Phone More Stable

[Ed Hansberry]

<a href="http://www.pocketpcmagic.com/removetapps/">http://www.pocketpcmagic.com/removetapps/</a><br /><br />The T-Mobile Pocket PC Phone is a great device but some users have reported that it locks up more frequently than it should. The culprit may be the extra applications T-Mobile put on the device before shipping it to consumers. Phillip Torrone has put together a step by step tutorial on either removing or disabling those apps to improve your Pocket PC Phoning experience. :D

[Paragon]

Removing these apps as pt suggests has worked very well for me. This subject has been discussed quite throughly on the XDA forum at pPCp and I have only heard 1-2 very minor possible side effects, and even they couldn't be confirmed.

It saves at least a 1mb of memory use, plus it stabilizes the XDA.

Thanks, pt, and the others who helped him check this out before endorsing it!

Dave

[cease]

Ed, thank you for publishing an easy to implement solution for removing the applications that DO cause frequen problems with the T-Mobile. I did it by piecing together various posts in othe discussion groups but your post is obviously much easier to follow.

I discovered something interesting after following your directions. After removing T-Mobile from the Today screen and disabling the new applications by removing the Battery Monitor and resetting the device as you suggested, the applications are gone, memory is saved and the device is more stable, etc. It's also more responsive. Blows away my X-scale e550g, in screen refresh anyway; I've done no scientific analysis.

Now if you now go back to the Today screen and simply re-enable the T-Mobile application, reset the drvice and then tap on the T-Mobile area of the Today Screen, the Tray applications magicaly re-appear. Not sure why but they are back, taking up memory again, slowing things down, etc.

So I guess the benefit is that this is an easy to get the applicaions back if you really want them; beats having to do a cold start.

...cease 8)

[DaleReeck]

It would be better if they hadn't been cheap and put 64MB memory in the unit like it should have had in the first place ;) Specialty PPC or not, all PPCs released recently should have at least 64MB.

[kagayaki1]

It would be better if they hadn't been cheap and put 64MB memory in the unit like it should have had in the first place ;) Specialty PPC or not, all PPCs released recently should have at least 64MB.

Yeah, and then it would have been a $700 device (with contract). They likely did this as a business decision to target a segment they believed would pay x amount, not x + cost of 64MB over 32MB. T-Mobile probably envisioned the mobile BUSINESS user wouldn't really need it, especially if they had an SD card to store things on.

The average enterprise user doesn't necessarily need a ton of things installed in the ROM...

[ThomasC22]

It's sad that T-Mobile didn't put a little more into these features because many of them looked really useful (I mean the VoiceMail/Messages thing on the Today screen is really a no brainer).

Then again, it's not out of the question for a shareware program to popup in the future...

But what I really wanted to say is that, although I think they've gone down the wrong path as of late, this is why I always liked Handspring. They, unlike any other manufacturer I know of, were concerned with the quality of their experience rather than just adding features. I hate to get all "Zen of Palm" here but I do think the PPC industry needs to go back and start focusing on things like stability now (note: I'm not saying Microsoft I'm saying the PPC industry)

[DaleReeck]

It would be better if they hadn't been cheap and put 64MB memory in the unit like it should have had in the first place ;) Specialty PPC or not, all PPCs released recently should have at least 64MB.

Yeah, and then it would have been a $700 device (with contract). They likely did this as a business decision to target a segment they believed would pay x amount, not x + cost of 64MB over 32MB. T-Mobile probably envisioned the mobile BUSINESS user wouldn't really need it, especially if they had an SD card to store things on.

The average enterprise user doesn't necessarily need a ton of things installed in the ROM...

Yes, but the ROM isn't the issue, it's the RAM. TMobile installed extra apps in main RAM memory even though it's clear the unit can't handle it. If the phone is not stable with lesser memory, then it doesn't matter how cheap it is. And the SD slot doesn't help the problem either. Besides, I doubt 32MB of memory would cost another $150-$200 to add.