Recover Android Phone Storage Using Temporary Root

If you often encounter the dreaded “Phone storage is getting low” notification on your Android 2.2+ phone and have already tried using “Manage applications” (under “Menu” -> “Settings” -> “Applications“) and/or “App 2 SD” to remove apps, move apps on phone storage to the SD card, or cleared the cache, you can try the following procedure to move even more “phone-only” apps to your SD card.

I have used this to gain about 30MB of phone storage by moving huge apps such as iGO (17MB), Skype (4MB) and fring (3MB). Although some of these apps have not been configured/enabled by their developers to be installed on the SD card, the procedure overcomes this by using a powerful tool called Titanium Backup.

Not every app should be moved to the SD card. You should not move system or ROM apps such as GMail, Internet, or Youtube. Apps with widgets should be avoided as well, since the widgets will break on your home screens if you move them.

When you have Titanium Backup on your phone, it can also perform detailed backups of your apps and data and remove ROM or manufacturer-installed apps (aka bloatware). Another three apps below allow you to download and purchase apps from Market if you are in a country or with an operator with limited Market access.

Warning: please make a full backup of your phone before attempting this procedure. I am not responsible for any outcome resulting from this procedure.

Prerequisites:

  1. Android 2.2 (Froyo) or above phone
  2. VISIONary+ by MoDaCo (download link)
  3. Superuser by ChainsDD (download link)
  4. Titanium Backup by Joel Bourquard (download link)
  5. Market-Enabler by Andrea Baccega and Tim Strazzere (download link)

Procedure:

  1. Go to “Menu” -> “Settings” -> “Applications” -> “Development” and check/enable “USB debugging“.
  2. Download and install VISIONary+. Launch VISIONary+ and click “Temproot now“. The display will show an icon and some text indicating its progress and return back to the menu. Go back to your home screen.

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    VISIONary+
  3. Download and install Superuser. You may launch Superuser to look at its interface, but there’s nothing you need to do there at this point.

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    Superuser
  4. Download and install Titanium Backup. Launch Titanium Backup and Superuser will interrupt with the following screen (not the exact wording here, just an example). Tap “Allow” to grant Titanium Backup temporary superuser/root access.

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    Superuser in Titanium Backup
  5. Titanium Backup will now gather the list of apps installed on your phone (dialog will indicate “Building exact app size information“), which may take a few minutes to complete.
  6. Tap “Problems?” button at the bottom, and tap “Yes, do it“. This downloads an additional tool called busybox into Titanium Backup’s data.

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    Titanium Backup
  7. Note the amount of free phone storage just above the bottom row of buttons, labelled “Internal“. The next few steps should attempt to increase the free amount.
  8. Tap “Backup / Restore” button at the top, you will see the list of apps that you can backup, remove and other operations.
  9. For each app that you want to move to SD card, tap the app and tap “Move to SD card“. After a while, the app will be moved from your phone storage to the SD card. You can note the additional free space gained in Titanium Backup.
  10. Optional – If your Market is limited, download and install Market-Enabler. Tap “Settings list” on top and select one of the more popular (read US) operators to fake your phone to. Go back to Market and see if you can search for and download more/premium apps.

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    Market-Enabler

I managed to go from 9MB phone storage available to 40MB, which gives more space for data-intensive apps such as Google Maps, Google Reader, Internet and Opera Mini. Hope this helps you, enjoy!

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Enable Hardware Acceleration on Lenovo X100e for Better Video Playback

Lenovo ThinkPad X100e, PNG Image 401x255px
Gasp! Red-coloured ThinkPad?!?

If you just got the awesome Lenovo ThinkPad X100e notebook and found the video playback to be jittery or out-of-sync with audio, especially when the video is of high-definition quality or encoded using the H.264/MPEG-4 codec, try the following procedure to force update the video driver (under Windows 7 in this scenario).

The latest ATI Catalyst driver from AMD is 8.723.0.0 (as of writing of this post), which is more updated than Lenovo’s version 8.663.2.1000, released on April 7 2010. Lenovo’s driver does not yet support hardware acceleration of video playback.

  1. Download the display driver and Catalyst Control Center from AMD by selecting your Windows flavour, “Radeon” and “ATI Radeon HD 3200 Graphics” here, or click here for the direct link to download the one for Windows 7 32-bit. It is important to download separately under the ATI Catalystâ„¢ 10.4 Components section because you just want to update the driver.
  2. Extract the display driver by running the file 10-4_vista32_win7_32_dd.exe, which should extract all its files to C:\ATI\Support by default. The Catalyst Install Manager installation program will start, but click Cancel to abort the installation.
  3. Navigate to C:\ATI\Support\10-4_vista32_win7_32_dd\Packages\Drivers\Display\W7_INF. This is where the display drivers are located, which you will use later.
  4. In your Start menu, go to Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Computer Management. Here, go to Device Manager -> Display adapters -> ATI Radeon HD 3200 Graphics. Open its Properties -> Driver tab.
  5. Click Update Driver… -> Browse my computer for driver software -> Let me pick from a list of device drivers on my computer -> Have Disk…. Specify the location noted in step 3 above in the field Copy manufacturer’s files from, then click OK.
  6. Scroll down the list and select ATI Radeon HD 3200 Graphics. An Update Driver Warning window may pop up to scare you, but click Yes to proceed.
  7. After the driver has been updated, reboot your computer and repeat step 4 above. Verify that the Driver Version field shows 8.723.0.0 or later/greater.
  8. Extract the Catalyst Control Center installation by running the file 10-4_vista_win7_32-64_ccc_lang1.exe. Proceed with the installation as usual.
  9. Reboot your computer again.

At this point, try to play some HD or Flash video to see any improvement. If there still is not much difference, I’d recommend you install the K-Lite Standard or Full codec pack from here. This includes a good video codec ffdshow and the Media Player Classic program.

If the default codec settings still don’t help, try tweaking them by reading thru the following links.

<URL:http://www.codecguide.com/faq_mpc.htm>
<URL:http://www.codecguide.com/faq_playback_issues.htm>
<URL:http://imouto.my/watching-h264-videos-using-dxva/>

I’ve managed to get full screen MPEG-4 playback to be smooth and no audio delay or jitter. CPU utilization also dropped by half from 100%. Play the video capture of the playback below that I uploaded to Youtube.

Windows Update may try to be smart and bug you to update the driver, but you know you are smarter. Hide/ignore the update because it’s going to install the older version. However, it’s a good idea to keep watching the Lenovo driver link above for its official update, especially when they release the quad-core X100e (with optional hard disk clicking sound!) later this year.

If you want screenshots of the procedure above, do let me know. Kudos to Peter Wong who gave the good advice in the comments section of this review.

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