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Installing Viigo Rendered My BlackBerry Useless
[Postscript: I am not blaming Viigo, as shortage of memory was likely the culprit. Before jumping to conclusions, please read my entire post plus the comment left by Viigo support. Since posting this, Viigo is still working wonderfully for me now that I have freed up some memory.]
Viigo™ is a highly-recommended (and free) RSS feed reader for the BlackBerry (and other platforms). I don’t know what went wrong, but the first time I downloaded and installed it, something went terribly wrong. I was able to fix it, reinstall Viigo, and am now happy with how it’s working. But here’s the story in case something like this has happened to you…
Viigo apparently can be downloaded only over-the-air (OTA), so that’s what I did. Using my BlackBerry Browser, I downloaded it from getviigo.com. It went very smoothly and my Viigo app went off and updated all its feeds (which took a few minutes). I’m not sure exactly when things went so badly, but over the next 24 hours, my phone started exhibiting very strange behavior. BTW–During this same period of time I also installed three other apps–Opera Mini, Google Maps, and Find My Berry–and I copied some photos taken on a digital camera into my phone. These facts become relevant later in my story.
When I picked up the phone and tried to do anything, I would get a tumbling hour glass icon over my Home screen. It seemed to keep going and GOing and GOING…preventing me from doing anything much with the phone. Every so often, maybe every 3 minutes, the hourglass would stop for a moment and let through some action I had started such as opening the Address Book. I tried shutting off the phone but couldn’t get control of it. I took a big risk and just removed the battery then replaced it. That seemed to help for a while, but at some later time, the hourglass started up again. Also, I noted that in the top right corner of the screen I keep seeing a flashing arrow indicating my phone was transmitting and receiving something. As well, my battery was discharging at a much higher than normal rate.
I guessed that Viigo was running and attempting to update its feeds (in some abnormal fashion). I changed (successfully, it seemed) the Viigo settings to stop automatic updating but that didn’t seem to help my problem. Finally, when I could get control of the phone, I did Options > Advanced Options > Applications and deleted the Viigo application. I probably cycled the power on the phone then, and afterward I had no more problems.
After a day of no problems, I really wanted to get Viigo working because it should work (I found no other complaints on the web) and it would be very useful if it did (RSS is such a great technology). So, I took a deep breath and repeated my previous downloading and installation of Viigo. But it failed to install because there was not enough (device) memory in my phone! I can’t fully explain that since I had just deleted Viigo, presumably freeing up the same amount of memory it would need to be reinstalled. But, I tried and tried with no success. So, I used Desktop Manager to delete a bunch of digital photos (many of which I had accidentally copied into Device Memory instead of micro-SD Card Memory). I also deleted the huge BlackBerry Sample Video from Device Memory–what a stupid waste of device memory that is.
With all that memory freed up, I was able to download and install Viigo successfully. I quickly went in and removed almost all the channels that come with the default installation–partly because I had no interest in those channels, and partly because I didn’t want that much feed updating going on. I only kept Viigo Bulletins, Welcome to Viigo, Engadget, and TechCrunch. I left the Article Settings for Automatic Update set for enabled at 2-hour intervals (the defaults).
To date I’ve had no more problems like the one just described, although I’m keeping my eye on how rapidly my battery is discharging. It seems to be a bit higher than normal but not terrible yet. [Postscript: A week later I am not having battery discharge problems using automatic update every 2 hours.]
I can’t say with absolute certainty that Viigo was to blame. But I have changed nothing with my other 3rd-party apps–they are still installed and configured as when the problem was occurring. Other than removing and reinstalling Viigo, the only change I made was freeing up some memory. Possibly Viigo needed more memory than was available–who knows? Anyhow, I thought posting this might be useful to someone out there.
10 comments on this post
First i would like to thank you for trying Viigo. I work on the support team for Viigo. Like any other application Viigo does require a certain level of free space on your device in order to work properly. I am suspecting that you just happened to run low on memory when you had this problem. You can go ahead and add other channels that you like to Viigo. We do have users that have 500 or more channels in Viigo with no problems.
We have done tests on battery usage with Viigo running and from my experience it doesn’t require that much more power to run. Please feel free to send an e-mail to feedback@viigo.com if you need any assistance or have any suggestions on how to improve our product.
Thank you,
Viigo support team
Thanks for your comment. I would agree that my problem with Viigo was most likely related to a shortage of memory. I’ve found one other posting that hints at this possibility–see http://www.blackberryforums.com/general-8300-series-discussion-curve/87291-viigo-killing-my-internet.html. I would recommend Viigo programmers look into whether Viigo has a weakness in memory management that can be improved or whether it’s a generic problem that would affect other apps about the same.
“I took a big risk, and removed the battery”
Generally, this isn’t a big issue with regular phones and smart phones like ours. The only time it would be an issue is if you have an unsaved document. But with my own experience with my new Pearl, I realized it auto-saves documents in almost real time. If I write something in the memo pad for instance, then pull the battery out and leave it out for say 5 minutes, then re-insert it, the memo is still there, and my cursor is right where I left it as well.
Had I done that with my old Motorola Q, the document would be lost forever. This is important for me, because I use a bluetooth keyboard to help me write my book.
I continue to be impressed with RIM’s engineering. Bull, thanks for easing my mind about the risks of pulling the battery. So, what’s this book you’re writing? And you’re writing it on your Pearl? I gotta hear more about this!
I installed Viigo after reading your blog on it. The memory on my Pearl went down dramatically. It had 13mbs prior to the download. I noticed the memory drop shortly after I started receiving feeds. I tried deleting the cache, but that didn’t help much. At the fear of sounding ignorant, I must still ask: what exactly does “cache” mean? Are we supposed to delete prior Viigo feeds manually, and did you find this to be an issue on your end?
After posting this (writing from my phone) I will have to remove the battery and start up again, which brings me to my next question. Is there a way to “refresh” the phone without having to go through all this trouble? I realize that after taking off the battery, the memory is once again at around 13mb. Haven’t found a way around this.
Before wrapping this up allow me to share a little tip I found on increasing your phone’s memory. From the picture options, changing the “reserved pictures memory” to 0mb gives you about 3mbs. Perhaps you may have already done that.
Ana,
Thanks for your comment and questions. First “cache” (a French word pronounced like “cash”) in the world of computers just means a temporary storage area in either memory or disk. For example, web browsers store web page images in a “cache” so that if you revisit that same page just moments later, the browser can pull that image from the cache instead of having to download it all over again. Saves time. I’m not sure if Viigo does any caching.
Although I read where BlackBerry owners have to pull their batteries quite frequently, I have only had to do that maybe 3 times when a 3rd-party application froze up. It’s just so abnormal to have to do that.
So many people are having memory problems with their BlackBerries that I feel the need to write an article about it. I’ve already done a lot of research and have collected a lot of material. Just need to get focused and write it. Your comment really gives me motivation to make that happen.
Please stay in touch and keep sharing valuable insights.
Thanks,
Kelly
their is a app that you can down load to your Blackberry that will reset it the same as a battery pull.this app name is soft reset and it doesn’t use much memory i used it on my 8130 and my 8330. if you have a curve you can reset it with out a battery pull by mashing the alt + caps + del keys. you can hold down the alt key and type LGLG this with bring up the event log you can clear it to free up memory.
Jerry,
Thanks for sharing that. I do have an article on SoftReset (for the Pearl) but your comment gives additional information that is helpful to readers.
Kelly
i never got the link to activate my account to join the forum
Jerry,
I cannot find you (your email address) in the user list for either the newBBie blog or forums. Perhaps your registration failed. Please try again and let me know if it fails again. This is the first known incident like this, so I don’t know that my site has a problem.
Kelly
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