In a previous post, I gave you a couple of things you can do to free up the memory in your Blackberry Pearl.  It’s vital you keep as much memory open on your Pearl to help optimize performance.  There’s something you can do right now to free up a massive amount of space on your Blackberry Pearl.

Put Multi-Media Items on External Memory

If you don’t have a MicroSD card installed in your Blackberry Pearl, you really should invest in one.  With picture, video and audio capabilities, you’re severely limiting the options you have for your Pearl.

Once you have your MicroSD card, make sure you move as much data over to it as possible.  Also make sure you configure your Pearl to store any new pictures, video or audio files to automatically go to your MicroSD card.  This is something your Pearl should guide you through automatically.

Now it’s time to move all of your previous media to your new MicroSD card. Here’s how:

1. Start on the main home screen (with all the icons)
2. Scroll to and click on “Media“
3. Press the Blackberry Button (with the 7 little dots)
4. Scroll to and click on “Explore“
5. Scroll to and click on “Device Memory“
6. Scroll to and click on “home”
7. Click on “user“
8. Scroll to and click on “music“
9. Select each item and press the “Blackberry Button“
10. Scroll to and click on “Move“
11. Click “Up” until you can see “Media Card“
12. Click on Media Card and select “Open“
13. Continue until you reach “Music“
14. Click on “Music” and select “Move“
15. Continue with the above steps until you’ve moved all your media over

This is all it takes to free up a large amount of space on your Blackberry Pearl. If you’re someone who has replaced your iPod with your Blackberry Pearl, you’re going to want to get as big a card as you can afford.

To keep your Blackberry Pearl running at the peak of it’s capabilities, you’re going to want to make sure you’re not wasting valuable memory on stuff you don’t need. You’d be surprised at what hogs up the memory. We’ll look at a few of the main items and how to delete or manage them.

First of all, how much memory do you have available? It’s very easy to find this out. Here’s how:

1. Click on the options icon (probably looks like a wrench).
2. Scroll to “status” and click
3. “File Total” is the total amount of memory available on your device.
4. “File Free” is the amount of memory free at this time.

Ok, so now that you know how much you have to work with, let’s see how big we can make that “File Free” number.

Clean out your inbox. I explain how to do this in another post, so I won’t go into the details here.

Content Compression

One of the quickest and easiest steps you can take to free up valuable memory on your Blackberry Pearl is to enable “Content Compression”. I don’t know exactly how much room you’ll gain from this, because I’ve always used it on my Pearl. If you’re isn’t already enabled, here’s how you do it:

1. Start on your main screen (the one with all the icons).
2. Scroll to and click on “options” (should look like a wrench).
3. Scroll to and click on “Security Options“
4. Scroll to and click on “General Settings“
5. Scroll down to “Content Compression“
6. If it doesn’t say “Enabled” click on it and select it now.
7. Press the Blackberry Button (7 dots left of the pearl)
8. Scroll down and select “Save“

That’s it. You’ve just enabled Content Compression. This will reduce the amount of memory used for all content, including picures, videos, music, calendar information and messages.

If yours wasn’t enabled before leave a comment to let me know how much memory you gained using this feature.

Delete Applications You Don’t Use

If you never play BrickBreaker, don’t let it hog up all the memory on your Blackberry Pearl. You might be surprised at how many programs are hanging out on your Pearl. Here’s how you find them and delete the ones you don’t want or need.

1. Go to your main home screen
2. Scroll to and click on “options” (looks like a wrench)
3. Scroll to and click on “Advanced Options“
4. Scroll to and click on “Applications“
5. Wait for your Pearl to build the list of applications
6. Scroll through and find any applications you don’t want, need or use
7. With that application selected, press the “Blackberry (menu) button“
8. Scroll down to “Delete” and press the pearl button

Note: Some applications will require you to restart your Blackberry Pearl before they’re completely removed.

There are a number of other tricks you can use to free up memory on your Pearl. I’ll explore some of those in a future post. Until then, take some time to impliment what we’ve gone over here. It will pay off in having a faster running Blackberry Pearl.