Have you tried adjusting the Wifi sleep policy? That does not require root.
As a matter of fact I have tried that, having learned about it from this thread. But before reporting my results, I should mention first that there are really two problems. When I mentioned listening to NPR in the afternoons, I'm usually out running errands when I do that. Since I don't want the phone to be spending its juice searching for WLANs in any street where I happen to be, does disabling sleep cause it to do that? I do have "Network Notification" disabled, so I think (hope?) not. And more importantly, will disabling Wifi sleep solve the problem when I'm away from the house using the 3G network?
By contrast, at home I do want to use my WLAN for reasons that should be fairly obvious. Trying out the sleep disabling trick for the first time last night, I found that it worked really well for about a half-hour, then quit as usual. Sometimes when this happens the memory, which isn't all that great at .5GB, is about 2/3 pegged, and sometimes the only way to clear it is to restart the phone, although more typically I can go into Memory Boost and shut some apps down. This morning the problem occurred again, and it didn't appear to be a memory issue, because the Memory Boost meter showed that it was only a third pegged, which is typical immediately after booting the phone. So I restarted the phone, and this is where it gets really aggravating: even though I had ear buds plugged in,
and I have Silent Boot downloaded and enabled, it blasted out its annoyingly loud boot tune. (If you don't think something as small as a mobile phone can "blast", try it in the early morning when you don't want to wake up your SO or any cats that might be in the room).
The bottom line is that streaming isn't working very well, whether I'm using the carrier's 3G network or my home network. At this point I'm not sure if this is really two problems, or just two flavors of one problem.
What's the point of owning an Android when it doesn't seem to work properly, except as an ordinary telephone and MP3 player? Being able to use TuneIn or IHeartRadio, which wouldn't run on WinMo 6.x, was one of the major reasons I wanted an Android. In spite of that deficiency in the much maligned WinMo OS, I can use it to stream many of the stations I want via either a third party app that can play .pls files, or by Windows Media Player, which can play .asx streams. (The caveat was that there has to be an .asx or .pls stream available from the station I want to listen to.) Within these limitations, the Windows device never let me down. If the carrier's network was there, there was never any problem; by contrast, my new phone drops streams whether a network is there or not. And all this that I've recounted is with simple audio-only streams. I think at broadband speeds I should be able to stream AV as well, whether TV in realtime, or just a downloadable program on HBO-Go. I certainly can do that on my PC, and while I understand that the phone doesn't have the same processing power or RAM of my PC, I'd think an app designed for mobile devices and screens only a few inches in length would be able to adjust the resolution and throughput requirements accordingly.
