Users Find Renting a Movie On iTunes Frees Up Space On iPhone, iPad

An anonymous reader writes: Many, if not all, believe that 16GB storage on their iPhone and iPad is not sufficient. Apple insists that users with 16GB variant iDevice can always save files to the cloud. At any rate, several users have found an interesting way to free up storage space on their iPhone and iPad. The trick is to rent a movie from iTunes (on your mobile device) that is larger than the storage you have available. If you have 500MB free, for instance, you could try and rent Bridge of Spies, which is a 5.79GB download, according to an article on BetaNews. "When you click Rent, a loading symbol will appear but then you'll receive a message informing you that "there is not enough available storage" to download the film, and you'll be given the option of managing your storage in Settings. Tap the Settings button, and -- ta-da! -- you should see the amount of free storage you now have is much greater than before. Repeating the process will free up even more space."

Comments

An article about a reddit thread becomes slashdot

[goombah99]

So someguy writes a blog post about a reddit thread about an an anecdotal observations on mac storage management. It goes on the slashdot front page. Worse the article itself doesn't discuss how this works or even how well it works.

From the reddit page, it says that several people observed 2 to 3 gigabytes of recovered space. It did not come from any one place but some came from caches. Random speculators suppose Itunes has large caches.

Golly.

I'd be interestd in hearing some comments about language efficiency on Android and iphones. My experience with java has led me to believe that it's likely that android phones have a severe Ram, cache, and energy efficiency handicap, and to a much lesser extent a flash memory handicap. The reason I suspect this is because Java program seem to use a lot more space than C based programs, their interpreter also has to be loaded, and their garbage collection creates memory overhead. As a result one has less available ram, more paging, and less efficient instructions. Now for the flash memory it's likely the case that media chews up more space than programs themselves so I suspect this is less of an issue. If all this is actually true it seems that comparing apple and android phones based on Ram obfuscates the fact that andorids need more ram to do the same job. Furthermore benchmarks using tight algorithmic loops are not seeing the cramped ram nor the overhead of JIT compilation of interpreted code to native that some interpreters impose. Thus one might expect these things to show up on app context switches, how apps are managed in the background, notifications/polling and shared data management--- all things that real users would see but automated test suites ignore in benchmarks.

Maybe I'm wrong about this. I'd like to know.