Do I need to reboot my HTC Desire periodically?

Question

I've had my HTC Desire for a couple of months now and it is awesome! (A huge improvement to my previous phone... Nokia 3315)

Though recently, I've realised that the phone semi-freezes more and more often - ie. when swiping between homescreens it will either pause/freeze and I will have to re-swipe to get it to change screens. Or worse, it just won't respond to any further swipes and I have to lock the screen then unlock to get the phone back into action.

Got quite annoyed at this (was probably happening once or twice a day) so I thought it might help to turn it off and on again. So I did - not sure if it was a placebo effect but it seems to have helped a bit?

So given that this is my first smartphone, I was wondering if it is 'normal' to need to restart the phone every so often. If so, how often is 'normal'? If not, what can I do to diagnose/fix this problem?

Answer 1

In my experience, for some devices, it helps to reboot the device about once a week. I don't know the exact technical implications of this but rebooting seems to free up the device in some way and make it respond quicker. This will not always be the case though, right now on my EVO i'm at 391 hours (16 days) of uptime and I don't notice any freezing or slowness. On my Hero I would though so I rebooted every-so-often. If you haven't already you may want to look into rooting and flash a custom-rom on your phone as usually that will give you better performance and battery-life. I have found this to be true since with both my Android devices and my previous Windows Mobile phones.

And while I don't recommend it, you can look into ATK for Android or some other task killer and see if this helps. You can make your own decision if you want to use a task killer - some people think they're great while others think they don't help.

Edit - I went to find some links both for and against task killers and mostly I found against. Here are two that lean against them but also talk about ways to use them.

http://lifehacker.com/#!5650894

http://www.androidcentral.com/how-properly-set-and-use-task-killer-oh-yes-i-went-there

Answer 2

I have had a similar problem but I also had my desire rebooting itself when using google maps. I spoke to vodafone who said return the device to us and we'll fix it, well I did and all they did was reflash it...total waste of time. Anyway ity started rebooting on its own again so I contacted HTC who were very helpful and said that on some desire handsets the motherboard was faulty and I need to send it to them for them to change the motherboard. I did this and 8 days later received my phone back and I have tested it with maps and all the app killer software and my phone works perfect. I say if you have any problems with any HTC contact them directly and they will sort it for you.