K-9 Mail and your Battery

[SSHGuru]

I've been running K-9 Mail since I first got the Droid 1 a year ago. I had it set to check 5 accounts every minute.

When I looked at what was taking up the battery K-9 was never very high.

However I just changed the settings to 5 minutes for important accounts and 1 hour for unimportant accounts. My battery life has doubled.

I think that it uses system resources that don't get reflected in how much battery it uses.

Just an FYI.

 

[takeshi]

That is odd. Though the rule of thumb is always that more frequent polling will use more battery (and every minute is extremely frequent).

 

[SSHGuru]

Actually it makes sense. Getting mail is one process but all the steps to get the mail use other processes. So the activity of using K-9 may not reflect usage in K-9 to a full extent. For example it has to go and activate your 3-g or wi-fi to check every minute. Both of those will use more than K-9 does itself.

Right now I'm at 80% - before I changed it I would be at about 40% now. Huge difference.