Meterberry is Still Valuable with 300MB Free Memory

Meterberry has long been one of my favorite apps for the BlackBerry. While I don’t have the same need for Meterberry on the Bold 9650 as I did on the Storm 9530, I just installed the application again as I really like the data it provides on power usage.

Meterberry gives me an easy way to check the percent to which my battery is charged. I know we have the battery indicator, but you can have 5 bars showing and only be at 70% charge. I know I can go into Options | Status to get the percent charged but with Meterberry I have that displayed right on the home screen. Some themes show the charge as percent vs bars but I am not a huge fan of themes and their associated overhead. There is also Alt + Shift + H which gives you tons of information including battery percent. However, for me it is worth the $3.99 for Meterberry.

On the Storm I used Meterberry to perform a “battery pull” and hard start the phone when my memory ran low. Additionally, I used Meterberry to perform scheduled reboots daily in the early AM hours. With the Bold 9650 I have not seen the device with less than 290 MB of free memory so that is not really an issue any longer. I have yet to feel a slow down. Hurray!

I also use Meterberry to see the amount of memory used since start-up as well as the free storage space on my SD card. One last goofy thing I like is getting the average discharge rate. Knowing I eat about 12% per hour tells me at 25% battery remaining I may last 2 hrs. or so.

I cannot find a BlackBerry application that shows the memory usage by application. Android can natively displays information about battery usage by application which is great for troubleshooting. While it does not show the memory use it does show me what an application is using like GPS, CPU, network and more. To get down to memory usage you have to turn to Quick System info and then you can know what applications are consuming the scarce resource we call memory.    You can see how these look on Android from the screenshots. On Android, there are also a number of apps which profile your usage and then calculate your remaining time on battery based on current usage. The one shown on the main Home Screen is called BatteryTime. All of these widgets usually take you directly to the Settings screen to see usage by app if you press the icon. If anyone knows of an app that can get that same information on Blackberry, please let me know.

This was not supposed to be a love letter about the Bold 9650, which is an amazing Blackberry. Sorry! If you have $3.99 and would like to know additional bits of information about your battery usage, then you need to checkout Meterberry in the RIMarkable store.