Whether
you're resisting the temptation to upgrade to newer, faster hardware,
or a year's worth of use has made your Android phone feel slow and
laggy, here are some ways to make your older phone run a bit smoother.
This guide
provides a number of tips you can use to speed up your phone, and while
not every tip will apply to you or your phone, you should find at least a
few tips in here that will. Whether you've rooted your phone,
overclocked, flashed a new ROM, or none of the above, you'll be able to
take advantage of a number of the tweaks below to get your phone from
sluggish and glitchy to quick and smooth.
Everyone's
phone is different, too, so note that some of the more advanced tweaks
may take a bit of trial and error on your part. I've experienced good
things with these tweaks on my Motorola Droid (which, yes, had gotten
pretty darn sluggish and glitchy, even for a barely year-old phone), but
I'll note where a different approach to a specific tweak will help
owners of older or more underpowered phones. Users with newer phones
(like the Droid Incredible or Galaxy S) may not need these tips as much,
but I've heard from several sources that even speedy phones like those
have benefited from these tips, so they're worth playing around with no
matter what phone you have.
If You Haven't Rooted Your Phone
There are a
lot of great tweaks out there for rooted phones, but there are a ton of
really simple things you can do to speed up your phone, even if you
haven't done any hacking whatsoever.
Try a New Home Screen Launcher
We've talked about the
benefits of other home screen launchers on
more than one occasion, but I can't stress how great of an upgrade this can be. As always, I'm a huge proponent of
LauncherPro,
as it will not only bring you a noticeable speed increase upon
installing it, but it also has lots of advanced features we can tweak to
boost our speed even further (more on that later). Of course,
ADWLauncher is also very popular, and the Android Market is rife with other options.
I'm going
to write the rest of this tutorial from the perspective of a LauncherPro
user, since from what I've seen, it has the most speed-boosting
options, but you should be able to find many of the settings I mention
below in other launchers, too—I'll note where a few of them are along
the way, but you may have to do some poking around of your own depending
on what Launcher you're using.
Lower the Number of Home Screens You Use And Ditch Those Widgets
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