This is where s60 users get frustrated thoughts about choosing a Symbian based nokia, when they started to see “Memory full” error messages. Symbian platform is renowned to suffer from memory management faults, this issue has various factors to be concerned as I think as follows,
1. Lack of memory management in the platform itself, is a main problem that has to be dealt with the Symbian architecture. so that the amount of memory allocated to each program has to be managed in such a way that it can handle the memory leakage without effecting the background processes. The main problem is that there is very little amount of memory is released back after closing an application which consumes a considerable amount of ram. Some task manager applications like besttaskman allows us to compress the memory so that some portion of memory is gained back. But this is is not effective enough to keep the phone running without going for a restart.
2. “The right red key is not for exiting, it is for end your calls”. this happens when non s60 users get their hands on Symbian devices. Ehey keep opening applications on and on, and press the red end-call button instead of pressing the right selection key or selecting exit from the menu. Then the memory full notification pops up and eventually they will end up saying wtf. This is a habitual problem we are facing when the Symbian smart phones get started to become popular among the java based ordinary mobile users who have been automatically adapted to a pattern of key strokes they do instinctively. So no blame on Nokia or Symbian, but better think of some key notation change.
3. Insufficient ram capacities provided by Nokia is one of the main reasons for this memory full errors. The amount of ram available in most new line Nokia devices are not sufficient enough to handle even their own built-in applications like gallery and the web browser. This was solved in some high end devices like N95 8gb.N82 and E90 by integrating a 128mb ram in them. And some delightful innovation came into action recently which indeed made my N95 trial really an enjoyable time without any haste. That is the demand paging offered in the latest firmware.so now even after installing a load of softwares still it has around 23mb free ram and it won’t go down under 15mb during usual usage. Also it regains the memory very effectively after closing the apps giving the chance to run the device without restarting it for many days. And it has brought significantly noticeable improvements to the boot time, so the devices having demand paging boot very quickly than the others. Here I’ve tested how many apps could run at once without running out of memory, and the results were very impressive, in my N80 this is just a dream. This new feature has made the N95 a perfect companion for multitasking, so you can listen to some music while you surf the web or editing you documents.
4. At last, no matter how well the devices memory management and ram capacities are some 3rd party applications sucks memory and drain the device resulting unexpected instabilities. Therefore I suggest that if symbiansigned could introduce some standards for this that might help to resolve many unwanted problems.