SPB Mobile Shell 3.5 Tips..

I just installed SPB mobile shell and my life has changed....

My god, I now have a phone which is about 5 times as efficient. For example, start bluetooth with one press on the home screen. The press s2p and have music play all from my home screen.

I now spent the moments I saved sice installing SPB, sitting in the dark and sulking about all the time I wasted before going in to WM connection manager and starting bluetooth then going into the start menu etc...

This is not without some problems however. There does appear to be some kind of memory leak issue a small one. Not sure if is WM or mobile sense because I never checked my memory usage as much when I was running WM with titanium. Starts off at 55 Mb and with all applications killed off ends up at 40 Mb by the end of the day. To clear it I usually kill mobile sense and then start it up again and back at 55 Mb.

This program is too useful not to have. Sure it may reduce your ram but I can live with 40Mb happily.

By the way thanks WR for the cabs to enable tilting and reflections.

This memory "leak" is kind of a known issue with SPB Mobile Shell, but continues to persist because it's also sort of a feature too (If you've added the Mobile Sense skin, that adds to it a little but not much). The way it works is that every new panel or graphical element you open/view/load in Mobile Shell loads into RAM and stays there until a soft reset or the shell is closed/reloaded.

You can see this most clearly immediately after you do a soft reset: check the available RAM once your Today screen loads, then pan left and right to the other home panels. Open Programs launcher, Contacts and the carousel, then close them all. Note that there is a slight hesitation loading those panels the first time, but zero hesitation loading them after that - they are in RAM now. Now check your available RAM. Probably lost at least about 3-5 MB.

There is a great feature in the Mobile Shell Manager program I mentioned a few posts back that makes it worth the install even if you don't want more widgets: it creates a shortcut you can put anywhere - Reload Shell. One tap, wait 10 seconds, Mobile Shell reloads and BAM you get 5-10 MB RAM back usually.  Great trick to pull right before opening Skyfire or Opera Mobile for some video watching
 

Actually, that makes good sense WR. Just like in a full Windows OS, caches and prefetches and so forth are there for a reason, and emptying them may increase free memory, but doesn't necessarily speed up or improve the user experience. Preloaded is sometimes a good thing, especially an app that is repeatedly used throughout the day and often worth the hit to the RAM to have it open faster when you want it. But doing a full reboot before switching to a different type of usage is probably best. Good advice there.

WinMo does love to hoard its little chunks of memory, but I have no real advice on that at the moment, other than to A: run the occasional memory release/cleanup utility like MemMaid, SKTools, Oxios, QuickMenu, or even CleanRAM (which seems work better on HTC devices than ours, unfortunately), B: soft-reset or reboot as needed and C: try to transfer as many large files like pictures, music, CAB files, etc over to your storage card as you can, and install apps to there as well if possible

Instead, I was trying to confine my reply to what I did know about Mobile Shell memory usage