Last week I was traveling on the east coast and staying with a friend while working from the road. About 4 days into my trip, my Blackberry went haywire. If someone called me, the call history would immediately delete the entry. When I received an email, if I didn’t do something about it within 6 hours, the message would disappear – and horrifically end up in the trash folder, ready for deletion, on the IMAP server. The last and most tragic piece was appointments I added to the calendar just vanished when I sync’d back up with my laptop.

As panic set in about lost appointments, messages and calls – I discovered the culprit – applications. As a social media junkie, I’ve installed a number of applications, many I use almost daily, but some far less often. Applications like Yahoo! Go have been replaced with a native Flickr app which better provides the functionality I was using. A test run of tinyTwitter to replace TwitterBerry that failed and a host of other applications left the system with very little available memory. On top of that, I’d been using the native BlackBerry version of Google Maps extensively to figure out where I was and where I was going throughout the trip building a huge cache of local map data that I could review while in subways. What finally tipped me off that the system was out of memory, was when I attempted to install the MySpace application and was told there was insufficient space. I deleted a few applications and all was well with the world.

Two come to mind after this experience. First, I wish I could install apps on the 2Gb media card I have in the phone, like I do with photos. Second, some sort of notice about low main memory would have been a nice! I’m chalking this one up to a learning experience and if I’ve missed a call or appointment – you might want to call me again.