Warning about taskiller

[Dan_Droid]

I doubt it's the apps that were draining power. More than likely you had GPS, Wifi, or something else on in the background which was using up your juice. Most apps are doing nothing when they are in the background. Unix (which Android is built on) is very good at managing memory and processes. It's not like a Windows operating system where the application is constantly using resources as long as it is loaded. So the short answer is: You don't need to be constantly closing apps, because the operating system takes care of it for you.

[HarleyDad09]

isnt google maps already loaded??

[superglen99]

I turned off taskiller today, bad idea. I wa playing a nintendo rom (punch ou!) and it was super slow. I opened task killer and and/killed everything and the rom worked great. I'm keeping taskiller on

[dannydoes]

isnt google maps already loaded??

If you mean loaded, you mean an app that is already installed on the phone, yes. But it's not running until you start it up, just like a photoshop on your computer.

Yes I had the GPS on. I always have it on. It doesn't drain the battery unless a program uses it. The real problem isn't that GPS was on, it was that I couldn't kill the program without task killer. Just like a PC, you should be able to hit X and exit from a program.

Im going to do a test, on a full charge, I'm going to see how much the battery goes in 8 hours without using anything on the phone and just leaving it on standby. Then I'm going to do the same thing after loading every program. Yes I will leave GPS off for this test, but I bet it won't make a difference.

[Dan_Droid]

The way I understand it, the GPS and Wifi are always using power unless they are explicitly turned off in the phone settings.

You can see which apps and services are using the most power since the phone was last turned on by going to Menu -> Settings -> About Phone -> Battery Use.

On my phone, the top 2 are usually Display and Wifi. The display is almost always responsible for 50%-70% of my battery use, and wifi is generally about 10%. Your mileage will vary based on how you use your phone, but the display is by far the biggest battery drain for me. I'll bet that if you are using the navigation app a lot (like you said you were), your primary battery killers will be the Display and GPS. On my phone the individual apps I use are generally responsible for less than 10% of battery usage.

[y6y6y6]

Yes I had the GPS on. I always have it on. It doesn't drain the battery unless a program uses it.

This is false. If you have the GPS on it will be a huge drain on the battery.

And there is really no need to guess about these things. The Droid keeps track of what is using the battery power. Go to settings > about phone > battery usage.

One of the things you'll notice on the battery use chart - All those apps you see running in the task killer app that you think are eating up the battery? They aren't.

[dannydoes]

That may be true y6y6y6, that gps, if not used drains the battery, but when I used google maps, than failed to "kill" google maps, the drain on the battery accelerated considerably.

Just my experience with it.

[jmed99]

I have not noticed any more battery drain since I quit using the taskiller. And btw, my notifications are working perfectly, gmail, hotmail, yahoo, twitter, facebook, text, VM, etc.....this rocks without taskiller. And again I've noticed no additional battery drain.

[dannydoes]

I've noticed a lot of people mentioning that they don't get notifications if they use task killer. I've never experienced that. Even if I kill everything, notifications have always come through. Could it be because I am using "advanced task killer" and not the simpler version?

[dannydoes]

ok so after charging, here's my usage in 1.5 hours and almost no usage, it just sits in my pocket for 95% of the time. This was with the GPS on and the SYNC on, how do you know if GPS is eating the battery? It doesn't state it here.

Display 34%
Phone Idle 28%
Cell standby 22%
Android system 9%
Android OS 3%
Android Core Apps 3%
Beautiful Widgets 2%