I agree with Gator352.
You've got to be careful as many apps (and games!) install a service in addition to the app itself. Typically, a service will run constantly in the background (possibly in a passive mode, but not necessarily) and often consume 'some' resource in the context of CPU cycles and battery power. Some will even use third party services (bluetooth, GPS etc., which will increase the resourcs needed). Some, like email apps may only initialise once every so many hours in order to check for email. Others, like live wallpapers will be running 24/7. Granted all these apps may be coded extremely well and only use a tiny fraction of your resources. At the same time, they may be memory hogs too
Plus, if you've got 10 apps and widgets running, each of which uses a paltry 1% of your CPU, that's still 10% in constant use that you won't have available for other things. Not to mention the amount of battery power those 10 will use in aggragate. Yes, individually they may look ok in your battery stats graph, but you also need to consider their total usage and whether the service they provide you is worth the loss in power?
I never use homescreen widgets these days. I know it looks great to have lots of them displaying snippets of vital info, but the trade-off (for me personally) is that I'd rather have more CPU and longer battery life. If I need to know who's posted a reply to me here, I'll quickly log on and look. It takes up a few seconds of extra resources to do it as opposed to having some app running with push notifications or polling forums every 15 minutes for those all important replies. It's not important to have this info so frequently, so I don't use an app to keep me informed.
Of course, I'm sure a lot of you will stick to using a ton of widgets and background services, which may indeed work well for you. Each to their own
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