I bought the Pearl today (love it so far), but after reading these boards for the past month, I'm a little concerned about the memory leak problem. I checked my Pearl today to see how much free memory it had and it was around 12mb. I haven't added any 3rd party apps yet. Is this the normal amount of free memory that the Pearl is supposed to have out of the box?

It is a vague number to shoot for, bberry626. In my opinion, 12mb would the minimum i would want to keep. i would be shooting for 15-20mb.

So... as you have read here, with your BB powered on, pull the battery and reboot. What is your file free now?

There really is no reason for over-concern. Following the FAQs on what to do is good maintenance.

I can tell you my experience...

I have a bunch of apps loaded, have also removed a few things (sample video, Help files, one theme, non-English language support) and I run between 10 MB (heavy use) and 16+ MB free (after a reboot). I generally hover around 11 to 13 MB.

I've never seen any adverse results (e.g., losing emails) w/memory in those ranges. Even when a bad moment w/Opera Mini took me to 9 MB, I didn't seem to lose anything.

I'm running the Sprint 8130 OS release (link at the top of this page), which appears to be better w/memory management than the version of the OS that was released w/the Verizon Pearls.

Anyone have any experence with memory managers like this one below?

MemoryUp-Mobile RAM Booster (Specially Designed for BlackBerry) - BlackBerry Handheld Software - powered by Handango

Do they help?

I wondered if I could put the Sprint on my Verizon 8130 with no ill effects? I generally run between 12 and 14 MB--is it worth it, or does it cause some other weird side effect?

The CDMA OS of Sprint and VZW are usable on each other. Follow the instructions as posted in our Sticky Notes here, above, i.e., deleting the vendor.xml file.
http://www.blackberryforums.com/gene...71-sprint.html

12.9 mb. Seems a little low considering I haven't downloaded any 3rd party apps or even set up my emails accounts yet.

any benifits of adding a sd memory card? would that give me more free memory? like adding a 2gb one? or only benefit of actually being able to put stuff on the phone then?

Not really. You can only store media on there, so if you take a lot of pictures and store them in the BB memory, it could help.
You can't load applications onto the SD Card.

JSanders,

When I bought the Pearl on Monday, it had 13.5 MB. Now it seems to hover at 12.9, even after a reboot. Is there any reason why it wouldn't go back up to 13.5 after a battery pull? And does 12.9 MB seem low for brand new Pearl with no 3rd party apps on it?

Apps (e.g., the browser) create caches on the Pearl.

Pardon the noob question but what does that mean?

A simple web def: A cache is a storage area on your computer of past content that you have viewed on your browser.

I don't know how the BB browser manages its cache, but I assume it's somewhat the way IE and PC browsers do...download and store web pages you visit, refresh them when things change, flush old data at some preset cache limit.