Surviving the limited memory of the Nexus One

I bought the Nexus One pretty much as soon as it became available, and have been loving the pure Google Android nature of the phone since, with one (perhaps 2 - the 1400mAh battery) exceptions. The internal system memory available for applications, and application data is fine for a few apps, but once you start to rely on a suite of applications, and install some of Google’s own memory hogs (Google+, Maps, etc) you rapidly run into issues.

The device has 512MB of flash, of which 190M can be used for application and data storage, plus a microSDHC card slot which can support up to 32GB - however some applications can’t be installed to this SD memory in the native build. 

In this post I describe how I used 1tap cleaner and DiskUsage to find out what was using the space, then initially App2SD to shift most apps over to the SD card. After that I migrated to CyanogenMod and uninstalled a few of the system apps. Then to get even more space I created an ext4 partition on the SD card and moved over the dalvik cache and download folders clearing out around 70MB of space. Finally I used Titanium Backup to move selected apps data folders from internal memory to the new ext4 partition on the SD card.

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Google Me - The future of social networking?

There’s been plenty of debate over what Google Me will be when it launches - and I’ve certainly not read all of it. I do however believe that Google is in the best position to create a killer and yet open social network.

My idea of a perfect social network at this point would be 

• Open identity - to allow me to login with my OpenID
• Ability to create and share status updates, photos, videos, and links to any of the social networks that my friends are using
• Ability for my friends to comment and interact with my activity streams such that I get the comments back on my original item - back in my preferred social network
• One list of contacts that I can segment into groups and transport between social networks and my email/phone
• Location based checkins, with my locations available to a select group of my friends

Here’s why I don’t think facebook, twitter or foursquare will win this in the long run

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