Droid woes

Huawei G300

I love my smartphone.  I resisted buying one for a long time but last year I treated myself to a well specified but cheap chinese Android - the Huawei Ascend G300.

Huawei Ascend G300 (review)

Like many phones it doesn't have much on board memory but this one does have a MicroSD slot that allows you add up to 32GB.  This is great for storing music, photos plus I've moved all the applications that I can to run from the card, to free up the internal memory.  Recently I started getting an annoying 'Insufficient storage available' error whenever I tried to install a new app or when Google Play tried to automatically update an existing one.  First it was intermittent, now it happens all the time.

Aaaaaa-rrrrrr-gfffffg-hhffffhh

It turns out that this is an extremely common error, particularly with cheaper phones but by no means restricted to the cheap models (Galaxy S2 and S3 users were also reporting problems).

So what does the message mean?  Well it's a memory availability issue but it's really not very clear what part of the memory in the phone is 'insufficient'.  Certainly it's not my 32GB card, which is more or less empty - it's either the 'internal SD' or the 'internal memory'.

Considering how common the problem is and the number of impacted Android users out there the suggested resolutions are quite 'insufficient'.  The average Android phone owner is not a computer geek who wants to spend hours trawling through technical forums and tweaking settings just to keep the phone functioning.

This is a good example of mainstream technology letting down the mainstream user.  Most of us just want a phone, a laptop, a tablet to work.  Turn it on and away you go.

IMHO the manufacturers need to stop selling us short on phone memory and make sure that their phones will run the OS smoothly without user intervention.  Failing that, one of the top downloads on Google Play should be a free app that takes the guesswork out of memory management and automatically makes the best use of the phone's resources.  There are such things for rooted phones but again, this is not something your average Jo wants to do.