Phone memory help?

[Eireann]

I got a used phone the other day (still under warranty, which may be fortunate). It works very well, but I discovered yesterday that although I put a 32GB memory card in there, the phone relies on its internal memory for many things. Messages, say. I can't send any messages because the phone thinks that the whopping number of eight messages is too much, and that I need to delete some. Which probably means that I'm not receiving messages right now.

The phone is an LG e400. I've read about ways to change the memory settings so that applications all go on the memory card, but it's a time-consuming thing to do, and more technical than I care to try.

Any suggestions? Yes, I'm going to talk to tech support at LG. They're closed on the weekends, which is the reason I haven't talked to them yet.

[Gizmo]

Check that the phone can take that card - I know mine can only take up to a 16GB and one even though it could take 16GB struggled and kicked out over 8GB.

[Eireann]

Yes, the memory of the card is fine. I checked the manual to see the maximum memory on the SD card for that phone.

[Ironclad Alibi]

Make sure the card is seated properly in the phone. I got a new phone last December. The salesman transferred my memory card for the old phone to the new one. But it just didn't recognize the card. After messing around with it for a while, I realized it had to click into the slot, and the salesman had not pushed it in far enough.

There might also be a setting on the phone the tells it which memory to use.

[ComputerNecromancer]

Yes, the memory of the card is fine. I checked the manual to see the maximum memory on the SD card for that phone.

Double check. I found two different max memory card sizes for my phone on the manufacturers web site. After much investigation, it turned out that the lower size was the correct one.

[corwin02]

It depends if it is an android phone or a windows phone , in case of a windows phone reformat the memory by using the phone and it will connect the memory to the memory pool and you are all set.

If however it is an android phone there is no such thing as a shared memory pool and you will have to manage the memory yourself
Most likely you installed a few apps on your phone and they all ended up in your main memory (the phone's memory) not the SD card
Download https://play.google.com/store/apps/d....apps.movetosd
to move your apps to the SD card and free up main memory

Furthermore check what other files there are on there that you can remove (lots of phones come with pre-installed bloatware)
A good free tool for that is appmanager https://play.google.com/store/apps/d...nstaller&hl=en

Also I noticed it is a used phone , you better use a file manager to check if there are large amounts of data on there (pictures most likely) which can be almost everywhere depending on the app that was used. Use a good filemanager https://play.google.com/store/apps/d...msoft.fm&hl=en to hunt them down and delete them

[Eireann]

The SD card is properly seated, yes.

It's an Android phone, and I discovered that this model has a TINY system memory. As in, 200MB. Which is ridiculous. It looks like I'm going to have to root the phone (which voids the warranty, but evidently, you can always unroot it), then play around with partitions. Much like what I did with my desktop computer not long ago.

Well (knock wood), I think it worked!

I downloaded App2SD, and it looks like it has moved my other downloaded apps to the SD card. The other apps (factory preset) are still in the internal memory. The messaging application worked, but it's factory preset, so I may have to deal with a lack of memory for my messages. Will I?

[corwin02]

Some of the factory preset ones cannot be moved (e.g. the phone application to make calls and the messaging application.
If App2SD can't move them they are not build to be run from an SD card and they need to remain.

What you can do is see if there are applications that you do not need who do take up precious system memory (to give an example, my phone came with a huge game pre installed that took up almost 400 mb and could not be moved) and de-install them.

Also make sure your camera application is set to store your pictures to the SD card

[EricKei]

The thing is -- 200MB is indeed small these days, but unless the OS or other mandatory apps are taking up a HUGE chunk of that space, there should be plenty of room for text messages. As long as they don't have pics/music/etc attached, even a paltry 200KB (1% of the total size) should be room for well over a hundred plain text messages; even if each one takes up a certain minimum amount of space, say, 4K a pop, that's still room for 50 texts @ 4096 characters per message (less the space taken up by the message headers).

I don't know what formatting system Androids use (NTFS has been the Windows standard since at least Vista, and possibly since XP SP2), tho most reserve a certain minimum amount of space for any file present, regardless of actual file size. On a chip that small, 4K per file would be a reasonable "reserved" amount.

[Eireann]

For the time being, everything is okay, though the battery does tend to drain quickly. What do you think - is rooting the phone and then partitioning the memory card worth it? Not that I plan to do it anytime soon.