So you are at the gym streaming internet radio via Pandora on your Blackberry Storm and you hear an alert for an email. Without stopping the music, you answer the email, then swap to your Twitter application, then send a text message and this all works fine. You still have Blackberry App World and VZ Navigator running from this morning in the background and decide it would be cool to shoot and upload a video of your feet moving on the elliptical via UberTwitter to Facebook.... and the world freezes.
The Storm has the ability to do alot of things at the same time and it has the ability for the user to destroy that experience pretty quickly. Some phone manufacturers increase stability by only letting you run one application at a time, RIM decided to give you the option of running everything and letting the user sort it out.
Multitasking operating systems have been around a long time. Windows Mobile, Android and Palm are other examples of a multitasking operating systems. It's a nightmare when designing a phone. Decreased battery life and draining memory. On the Blackberry, the ability to download applications from third party creators not necessarily approved by RIM adds a new twist of freedom and horror to the mix.
You learn pretty quickly how far you can push the phone and multitasking is probably the most common reason people hate the phone. "It's so slow !!" "It's crashing !!" This is also the reason why the store display phone is generally horrible as the day grinds on. Everyone who has walked by starts running a new application.
The Switch Application tool bar is your friend (see photo above). From the Blackberry button, this is accessible while running any application. It provides a widow into what is running similar to Crtl-Alt-Delete/Applications on a PC. This window allows you to jump between applications and CLOSE THEM DOWN if you don't need them.
So it is possible to listen to music and text and email, especially when running multiple email accounts though the Blackberry mail server system rather than using dedicated applications like Gmail, just shut down the navigation application you were using six hours ago.
I like the free application (Blackberry App World) QuickPull. It simulates a battery pull complete boot for the Blackberry Storm. You can schedule this complete cycle automatically in the middle of the night and it doesn't affect your alerts or wake-up
alarm.
Purge your email and text/picture/video messages. Multiple accounts with multiple attachments combined with text, pix and video left in for days eats up memory and makes the phone sluggish.
You can select the number of days you want to keep in the mail in each account automatically. I prefer a 15 day window automatic deletion window and to pick a moment when I have time and Delete Prior for each account. While you can delete messages from your native mail account account via the Blackberry mail server system, the mail that appears in the phone from your Gmail, Yahoo, corporate mail server, etc. is a mirror of that mail. All that garbage still looms on a server somewhere unless you decide to manually select a group of emails in your Storm and delete at the same time.
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