Kinoma Notes

Does your phone feel a bit janky lately? Maybe a lit­tle slower than it did when it was new?

One of the great things about Win­dows Mobile is its open­ness — users can install what­ever they like, and devel­op­ers aren’t lim­ited by arti­fi­cial restric­tions. But with great power comes great respon­si­bil­ity, and unfor­tu­nately not all soft­ware is engi­neered to the high stan­dards of Kinoma Play.

Why do we care? Because Kinoma Play cre­ates max­i­mum joy when your phone is per­form­ing at its best.

How to make your phone like new again

When your phone’s act­ing up, you can get like-new per­for­mance again by doing what we call a grade-and-pave. To do a grade-and-pave:

1. Sync your phone’s data to your PC
2. Wipe your phone
3. Install any avail­able phone updates
4. Install your apps and sync again to restore your data

Typ­i­cally, the whole process takes about 30 minutes.

#1 — Sync

Sync your phone to your PC. Make sure Win­dows Mobile Device Cen­ter is con­fig­ured to sync your con­tacts, cal­en­dar, tasks, notes, and every­thing else you might want to save.

The con­tents of your Stor­age Card shouldn’t be affected by a grade-and-pave. But back­ups are A Good Thing, and this is a great time to copy the con­tents of your Stor­age Card to a PC.

Alter­na­tively, you can use Microsoft My Phone to sync your phone to save your phone’s data online instead of on your PC. (We haven’t per­son­ally tried this, so be care­ful out there!)

#2 — Wipe your phone

This is known as doing a “hard reset”, and gen­er­ally involves hold­ing down 1–2 but­tons while you doing a reset or turn­ing on your phone. Con­sult your man­ual for details, or search for “hard reset [your phone model]” for instructions.

Note: This will delete every­thing from your phone, includ­ing Kinoma Play!

#3 — Install any avail­able phone updates

If there are any avail­able updates for your phone, now’s the time to install them. We rec­om­mend­ing check­ing the sup­port sites for both your net­work oper­a­tor (e.g. Sprint) and the phone maker (e.g. HTC).

#4 — Install your apps and sync

Rather than auto­mat­i­cally installing every­thing that was on your phone before the grade-and-pave, we rec­om­mend installing only the soft­ware you actively use.

To get a fresh Kinoma Play installer, go to http://kinoma.com/support/ and click “Need your installer or pur­chase key?” You’ll be prompted for your reg­is­tra­tion email address, and the URL for the cur­rent installer will be sent there.

Once you’ve rein­stalled your apps, sync your phone again to restore the data you sync’d to your PC in step #1.

Enjoy!

A grade-and-pave gets you a like-new phone expe­ri­ence with­out spend­ing any­thing but a lit­tle time.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 3rd, 2009 at 12:00 am and is filed under Kinoma FreePlay, Kinoma Play, Symbian, Windows Mobile. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.