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RANT! Why The Long Boot Times?

by Ronen Halevy on Apr 7th, 2008 at 10:01 am EST
6 Comments »
 

OriginalIBMpcI know it is going to be hard following up on the heels of Luciano’s rant about the Owners Lounge but this one has been annoying me for awhile already.

One of the things that always bothered me about the BlackBerry OS is why it takes more than a minute to boot after I pull the battery to restart. Many times it takes upwards of 2–3+ minutes until it restarts. To be honest until a year ago I never really pulled the battery on my BlackBerry but with the recent memory leak problems and having to take out the MicroSD card that is underneath the battery I have been doing this frequently.

Is this something inherent with running JAVA as the basis for the BlackBerry OS? Would it really kill RIM to give us a loading screen beyond a spinning hourglass? This is even worse when you reload the OS from scratch where the first boot can take upwards of 20 minutes!!! Maybe if they gave us an optional view into the console showing which modules were being loaded…

I also find that every time I pull the battery my BlackBerry reboots with 5–10% less battery life then before the reboot. The main reason I do it is that when I reboot I get to reclaim all of the memory that is lost due to the memory leak problem. I know that long boot times are nothing new for smartphone OS’s but even my underpowered Symbian and Windows Mobile Smartphone devices rebooted quicker than this. Some of those even had loading screens.

So I have to ask. How long are your boot times after you pull the battery on your BlackBerry?

I am starting to create a personal RANT list of things RIM needs to fix. I will probably ask all of you to chip in before I send it off to RIM… At the top of my list is a proper task manager that shows where the memory leak is coming from. Or better yet a fix for the memory leak.

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This entry was posted on Monday, April 7th, 2008 and is filed under Rant.
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6 Comments to “RANT! Why The Long Boot Times?”

  1. Posted by: David B
    April 7, 2008 at 1:10 pm EST

    Ja, fix the memory leak is at the top of my list too. In fact, I’d put aside ALL OTHER COMPLAINTS (for a while at least) about my BB if that single one was fixed. On my old 7100i running OS 4.1.x I don’t recall ever ONCE in a year and a half having to pull the battery because available RAM was ZERO BYTES! I’ve been doing battery pulls on average every 3-4 days since getting this VZW 8830 last summer. Others reading this please don’t point me to all the sites with proposed solutions, I’ve followed them all short of installing another carrier’s OS, to no avail.

    Just did a pull on my 8830 to time it for you Ronen. At 30 seconds a full white screen with spinning hourglass appeared. The VZW logo screen appeared at 1:53, and my screen appeared at 1:59. After entering my device password it took another ~10 seconds to “organizing call logs”. HTH.

    IMHO, as you suggested, a scrolling “module loading display (ala a linux PC booting up) might help pass the time and frustration of repeated reboots.

  2. Posted by: Ronen Halevy
    April 7, 2008 at 1:20 pm EST

    You read my mind about the Linux like boot screen. It would save me some headache of staring at the stupid hourglass.

  3. Posted by: Luciano ES
    April 8, 2008 at 7:44 am EST

    Mine always takes from 2:50 to 3:15. Never less than that.
    .
    But you guys actually stare at the hourglass? I always put the phone in the case/holster and go take care of something else. Then I get back to the phone after some 5 or 10 minutes. I don’t really care about the loading screen, but would like to have the phone play some sound at boot up to let me know it’s ready. Sometimes I send myself an e-mail before hitting Shift+Alt+Del, so the mail will beep as soon as the bootup sequence is over. But a startup sound would be better.

  4. Posted by: Bull
    April 9, 2008 at 10:01 pm EST

    Yeah I don’t really look at it either… then again I don’t have to do this as much. I don’t mind a long boot time, knowing that my BlackBerry will run for at least a week or more before I just might have to pull the battery. But as Luciano said, I just put it in my pocket and do something else. Has never really bothered me before.

  5. Posted by: Bull
    April 9, 2008 at 10:02 pm EST

    Note: I had to wait much longer when restarting my old Moto Q. I’m much happier with the BlackBerry.

  6. Posted by: Luciano ES
    April 10, 2008 at 2:01 am EST

    Really? Wow. The Moto Q is worse than I thought! :-)