Remove Excess Media

Some newer BlackBerrys, like RIM's Pearl and Curve devices--and the as-of-yet unreleased 9000--have cameras for photos and media players for watching video and listening to music. Some BlackBerry devices can also capture video, like the BlackBerry Pearl 8120. Even RIM devices without cameras, like the 8700 and 8800 series handhelds, have media players so users can view images and video downloaded from websites or sent by friends or coworkers. Media files, particularly video files, are quite large and can do a job on your device's available memory.

If you like to store lots of images, music files or video on your device, your best bet is to get an external storage card, like a MicroSD card, so you're not using internal memory for your media consumption. It's also a good idea to do away with any images or video you don't want to keep or other media you don't use frequently.

You can delete media files via PC or Mac using the BlackBerry Desktop Manager software, or you can use your handheld. To do so using just your BlackBerry device, click your Media icon on the BlackBerry home screen and select the type of media files that you wish to delete: music, videos, ring tones, pictures or voice notes. Once you've selected a media type, highlight the file that you wish to remove, hit your BlackBerry menu key, choose Delete and confirm the deletion. (Note: Some preloaded images or file types can only be removed using the BlackBerry Desktop Manager software.)

Optimize Calendar Appointment Settings

Like your Messages application, your BlackBerry calendar stores data on past appointments, meetings and other events. You can free up some device memory by reducing the period of time for which the calendar stores that data. Depending on whether or not you sync your calendar with a BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) and a corporate mail client or frequently enter in meetings and other happenings, you could see a noticeable increase in available memory by tweaking your Calendar app's Keep Appointment settings.

To change those settings, click Calendar on your BlackBerry icon screen, hit your BlackBerry Menu key and choose Options. From there, scroll down to Keep Appointments and set the value to the shortest acceptable time period. Again, like your Message app, the shortest interval is 15 days, but you can also choose to keep appointment information forever.