The biggest most annoying problem on the G1 is the lack of memory available on the phone.  Sure enough the apps you install are plenty small enough and the phone is based on Linux so this should not be too much of an issue, that said, if you do install a few apps and download email and browse the web and receive SMS and MMS messages, pretty soon your phone will kindly notify you that it’s full.  Can’t eat another thing, not even one more wafer thin mint.

So you merrily go clearing up your browser cache, delete a few emails (and remember to empty the trash) etc. Then you reclaim some space.

One thing I noticed yesterday while I went through this exact excercise, was that the Market Place is currently sitting pretty with a cache of over 20M on my phone, that’s 20M of my space that I’d really rather have back actually.  Unfortunately, there’s no way of clearing it out manually.

A search of t’internet brought up this entry in the Google suport forum.  Seems that currently the only way to reclaim that space is to wait until the phone runs out of memory and then the auto reclaim will empty out the Market Place cache.

Google have already acnowledged that this is not ideal and should be doing something about it in a client update, hopefully this will be cupcake when and if it is ever actually released for the G1.

So next time your phone complains about the lack of space, perhaps hold off uninstalling everything and let the Market Place Cache clear up first.  With a bit of luck that process will clear up all the apps in the my downloads list that you uninstalled but still sit there.

To check the size of your Market Place cache, open up Settings > Applications > Manage Applications then scroll through the list to Market and you will see how big it is.  Select the entry in the list for more details.

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