Simple ways to speed up your Android Device

As users of Android devices, we hate it when we experience any type of slowness or stutter on our devices. There are a number of ways to solve that issue. Most often times a new ROM will help solve your woes but not always. Not all of you are rooted or know how to install custom ROMs. For those of you that are still running stock devices, there is a little hope.

The first thing you can do is turn of all the window animations. Granted, this does take away some of the prettiness on your device, it will help speed things up a bit. You can locate those under Settings>Display>Animations and switch it to ‘No Animations.’ On 2.3 devices you can also turn off the ‘Screen Animations.’

The next thing you can do is remove any and all live wallpapers. Of course we absolutely love to have our live wallpapers running, but they can not only suck the life out of your battery but also slow down your device.

Another thing that many people absolutely love that can hinder your Android experience is the use of widgets. Although widgets are all well and good, overloading your screens with widgets can also play a factor in your speeds and battery life. Clear as many widgets off your screens that you don’t absolutely need. If the widget has polling option change them to manual or spread out the time that it polls for the information that it provides. For instance, if you use Beautiful Widgets you can set it up to refresh every time you wake your device. How many times a day do you wake your phone up?? Probably a couple 100 times or more. Setting this to every 4 hours and manually updating the weather when you need it will save battery and processing power.

Now having a rooted device you have more available options at your finger tips. Some ROM, such as CM7, include various settings in the ROM to adjust certain aspects of your device to perform to your standards. With so many ROMs to choose from though, we will go over a couple generalized apps that everyone should be able to use.

Although most all flash-a-holics know about overclocking, we will talk about it for just a few. There is a handy little app in the market called Set CPU. Nearly ever device and ROM ever made has the ability to speed up the processor. The most common misconception is that clocking your device to a higher frequency will damage it. That can be true. If you set your max to high and experience issues or your device starts to get hot, lower it a bit and let your device cool off for a bit. In the XDA forums you should be able to easily find a guide or post about clock speeds that work best for the ROM or your device in general. Takes a little bit of reading and occasionally a little bit of guess and check work. We recommend clocking up in small increments and giving it a day on a full charge to see how it works out for you. Again though, if the device is getting warm, change it immediately to prevent damage.

The next app in the market that can be of benefit to you is one called VM Heap Tool. This has nothing to do with your Voice Mail. I thought the same thing when I saw its name for the first time. This tool is designed to change the Virtual Machine Heap size. Increasing your heap size will allocate more RAM for apps to use and help speed things up a bit. For instance, on my Vibrant I am running MIUI. I changed my VM heap from the recommended 32 to 40. After it is set the device reboots. That simple and small change has sped up my device quite noticeably.

The final app we would like to share is one made for speeding up your SD card read/write speeds. There are a view various apps in the market that help you achieve this, but the one I have been using lately is called SD Speed Increase. The cache size of the memory card is generally set pretty low. There is no sure-fire setting that is guaranteed to speed it up to its maximum potential. You will want to play around with it a bit to find a happy medium of speed and performance for your uses. Most people recommend starting at 2,048kb.

All of these aren’t going to solve all of your issues ad there are certainly more tips and tricks out there to help you the most from your device. Sometimes, on older devices, your best bet is to just buy something newer with better specs. If you know of a few more things that are fairly easy for the general population to do, please let us and them know in the comments below.

Application: VM Heap Tool
Developer: martino
Cost: FREE