If you’re a G1 user, you’ve probably experienced the memory crunch that occurs on the device.  You’ve installed all your favorite apps but now your phone runs slow, and apps crash or “Force Close” all the time.  If your phone gets as bad as mine did, you could reach the point where the home screen and dialer apps themselves crash, meaning you have to wait minutes at a time to use the phone, and even longer to make a phone call.  Fortunately there is a simple fix.

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The problem with the G1 is with memory management.  The phone doesn’t have much on board memory and by default, it installs all of your apps in this memory, with no way to put them on the sd card, which could contain 16 GB of extra storage.  The reason for this is that with the app market, there is concern that if apps are stored on memory cards then people will copy them and pirate them to other G1 users.  Unfortunately, since the phone itself doesn’t have memory you will bump into it’s handicapping 25 MB restraint.  That is, in order for Android to run well it needs to have at least 25 MB of phone storage free.  To check your storage, open the home screen, press the menu button and tap settings.  Scroll down to and tap SD card and phone settings.  Look at the section under Internal phone storage that says available space.  If that number is under 25 MB then your phone is probably slow and you’re probably leaving comments that new apps you download don’t work, when they really do, but your phone can’t run them because its out of memory.  Also take note of the option under the available space that says “Factory Reset”.  More on that later.

The good news is you can free up memory fairly easily.  First try uninstalling some apps.  You probably have 4 or  5 that you downloaded thinking they sounded neat, but never actually use them.  Next try emptying the browser cache, deleting old text and picture message threads and deleting emails.  If you are as bad as I was (I only had 6 MB free), you probably can’t delete enough to free up memory.  In that case you should download the online backup app to backup your contacts online and perform a factory reset.  This will erase everything in your phone’s memory, while leaving your memory card’s contents in tact.  When you have your phone setup again go back to the android market and tap on the downloads tab.  This page will list all the apps you’ve ever purchased or downloaded for free.  This way you don’t have to search for apps again or buy them again.  Just install what you want, but try not to fill up your phone again.

The beautiful thing is, if you had your phone before the 1.5 and 1.6 updates came out, after a factory reset it will run faster than it did when it was brand new.  My G1 right after the reset was faster than my sister’s iPhone 3G, which is amazing considering the weak hardware the G1 runs on in terms of processor and memory.