Comments on: Desktop Manager 4.6 Now Makes Sense – Sort Of

By: larry

larry — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 03:38:35 +0000

Does 4.6 use less RAM? It appears that 4.5 takes up more than 160Mb. That seems absurdly high.

By: Jeff

Jeff — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 20:24:33 +0000

I’m using DM 4.5 and it minimizes to the Windows tray (the area where clock is).

By: Richard Wood

Richard Wood — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 14:36:08 +0000

One big difference I noticed between DM 4.5 & 4.6 is the ability to minimize to tray, which disappeared after v4.2.

Am I mental? This IS the biggest improvement to me!

By: John

John — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 14:15:05 +0000

So on a Bold, what does this extra 1GB storage look like to the user? Is it in addition to the “In Device Memory” option I see when selecting where to save my camera pictures on my 8300, for example? Or is it still called “In Device Memory”, which is now saved separately, whereas before it was saved as part of the .ipd backup file?

By: Ronen Halevy

Ronen Halevy — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 13:39:03 +0000

Sorry for the confusion guys. I was just pointing out that the difference between 4.6 and 4.5 is support for built in memory storage. Before that I could not see any difference between 4.5 and 4.6. For now that means the extra 1gb of space on the Bold and other upcoming devices. This extra space was not backed up anywhere and the ability to interact with it is limited to DM 4.6.

By: John

John — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 13:20:40 +0000

It’s not the original author of the post – RIM’s own KB article says

===

if the option Backup device memory content is checked (defaults to checked) the Device Memory on the BlackBerry smartphone is backed up as part of the backup process. The backup process creates two files

* an .ipd file which is the backup file for BlackBerry Desktop Manager
* a compressed file of the Device Memory

===

On an 8300, at least, selecting or deselecting the option makes no difference. The resulting .ipd file is the same size. Maybe, for later devices, what is currently the ‘Content Store’ (media I think) is stored separately and now has this option to ignore. Funny that it’s compressed too. I’d expect it to be mainly .jpg’s and mp3′s which gererally don’t further rcompress anyway!

By: Andrew

Andrew — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 12:35:49 +0000

That’s what I was thinking. What does the writer of the article mean by “you now have the ability to backup and restore the internal device memory”? and then talking about .ipd files? Last I checked, this was available in old DM.

DM 4.3 and 4.5 all allow you to save everything on the internal memory (for example, when you install new OS, everything is backed up and restored)

Rather confusing, this article…

By: John

John — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 12:31:11 +0000

I don’t fully understand this.

On my 8300, at least, the internal memory is already backed up (it’s the ‘Content store’ right?). Certainkly when I restore from a backup, EVERYTHING seems to be restored from the .ipd file.

Do the newer devices with ‘Device Memory’ implement that as a ‘virtual SD card’ which is thus separate and requires backing up separately from the ‘Device Memory’ that I have in my 8300?

And I just did a backup of the 8300 using DM 4.6. I made one .ipd file, despite having the setting to back up device memory ticked.

All rather confusing…