[Captivate Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] dgemhsu:
Hello Everybody. Thank you all in advance for any help you can give a noob with the Captivate. I tried searching for similar threads and I couldn't find any.

I just got this phone about a month ago and have not modded it on my own and have only installed applications through the marketplace and added music/taken pictures.

It is an unlocked (how it was unlocked I don't know, the cell phone shop had it done for me) and I use it with TMobile. I don't know if it is rooted, or if it is Froyo XYZ, etc and all I was told is that I am not to do a system reset of the phone to get it back to original factory settings or else they'd have to jump through hoops again to get it working again (I had problems getting it to receive MMS and get online before)

The issue I am having is that all of a sudden yesterday, I got a red notification icon on the very top of the phone and it told me that my Internal Phone Storage was full or nearly full. And then shortly after that.. I received another notification that my text message box was full and some new messages were refused because it's full.

I quickly deleted all of my text messages (about 20 threads or so) except for one old one that had some important simple text info on it (no mms). But that didn't fix the problem. I still received the text message full notice even after I turned off the phone, pulled out the battery and restarted it after a minute or so.

I also uninstalled many of the games and fonts and applications that I had installed through the marketplace and tried restarting my phone yet again and still nothing. I had most of the apps except one or two on there for at least a 2-3 weeks so got rid of the few that I just installed this week.

I was unsure what types of things affect what portion of the Internal Phone Storage and what types affect the Internal SD (I don't have an external sd card but may get one if that helps). Applications are stored and ran from where, if the amount of text messages affect either (tho I had already cleared out the mailboxes).

The settings showed:

Internal SD Card:

Total Space: 13.03 GB

Available Space: 11.88 GB

Internal Phone Storage:

Available Space: 189 MB

I called the support at Samsung and they were absolutely no help at all saying that the Internal SD Card and the Internal Phone Storage were one and the same and they share the 16GB total (which is possibly true in one being a smaller partitioned space for system useage while the other larger partition is for things like Media). The thing that got me was when I asked them what kinds of things take up space in the Internal Phone Storage vs Internal SD and basically asked them which one the text messages affect and which one the applications affect, they said that both affect both. Well in that case, I should have plenty of space seeing as I have 11.88GB of SD left. His solution was to to restore to factory settings.

I felt that they were not able to tell me and tried the Chat. They told me something else altogether for the most part... that the Internal Phone Storage is not used for Anything at all and everything is run and stored in the Internal SD. Her solution was to to restore to factory settings.

Basically they were no help and just kept pushing to restore to factory settings, so I just decided to uninstall just about all the apps/games/live wallpapers that I installed (I can't touch the crap that AT&T had on it when I got it new) and it seems to have worked.

Now my Internal Phone Storage:

Available Space: 215 MB (while it seems to have gone down from 216 yesterday after I uninstalled all the stuff)

I don't want this to be a temporary fix since my phone Should be able to do all the cool things and have cool apps and games and the like and shouldn't be a barebones phone, otherwise I could have gotten a much much cheaper non touch screen Nokia not so smart phone if all I wanted to do was talk and text on it.

I don't think that the media should be making much a difference considering I only have about 1.5 GB used up and what would be the use for having a boasted 16GB internal storage if it craps after less than 1/6 of it's capacity?

So if anyone could help with finding a permanent solution for this so I can go back to having a cool smart phone!

Would I be able to buy an external mirco sd and then install/store/run all the applications on there?

Does the text messages take up much space and where is that stored?

Again, I thank any and all help in advance!!!