Reboot Your Cell Phone to Fix Menu Lag
Feb 5th, 2007 by Alex
I noticed this weekend that my Motorola V325 was starting to experience some serious menu lag. When you’d key the Talk button to bring up the “All Calls” list, it would take several seconds before the menu came up. The same thing would happen when attempting to dial someone from the list or the contacts list.
My first thought was memory usage. Granted I know nothing about how cell phones store data these days, but it’s got to have some amount of RAM to process everything. So I tried deleting all of my call records… and it didn’t help.
I stood there for a minute before deciding that I was a dumbass. It occured to me that I probably hadn’t turned the phone off in two months or more. Most application code has memory leaks, at least most that I’ve dealt with. Just like a periodic reboot for your computer fixes the effects of memory leakage, I imagine the same would hold true for cellular phones. That is, if Verizon Wireless’ software is as poorly developed as everyone else’s software…
So I turned off my phone and waited a few seconds before turning it back on. After the boot — which I swear takes a day-and-a-half longer than older phones — completed, the menus are fast as the day I got my phone out of the box. Is it just me or has cell phone boot time increased significantly in the past few years?
Although I wish I hadn’t erased my call log, I do feel better knowing that a weekly/monthly reboot can remedy this issue. Naturally, my StarTAC never had this problem.
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