Please help me understand a few things

[sextonar]

So ive had my evo since june 4th and love this phone... is truly amazing. I just have a few questions that I hope you guys here can help me out with.

Battery Performance. I seem to be getting decent battery performance out of my unrooted phone. Yesterday i got about 20 hours out of it. That was after 100 or so texts, a few phone calls, and general web browsing. Is it normal though when I play a game on my phone like "lets golf" or run a app like "Rdio" that the battery practically drops 1 percent a min? I didn't mind to much with the golf game, but I'm really digging Rdio and before I purchase it I want to make sure im not wasting my money due to battery issues. So is this the standard when running apps on this phone, its sucks your battery quickly?

Next question is Task killers....

Im running ATK, even though I have heard several times that there is no reason to run a task killer. But my big question is why are these programs even running in the background of my device? Would it really be that big of an issue that a program have in the menu and option to exit, and when you do the program is done, finished, not running in the background. This seems like a simple request. I mean its annoying as hell to run Rdio, exit out of it, log offline, then see in my task killer 3 minutes later that its running in the background along with 15 other programs.

Any info or feedback would be appreciated.

 

[pwnst_r]

I don't have an opinion on the 1% drop in battery when using apps because I just don't pay THAT much attention to it. We all know that the battery life fairly sucks on this phone. It is what it is.

RE: task killers - I use ATK and although I was diligent about using it prior to Froyo, I've not been as much after. Before Froyo memory would dump to about 48MB after awhile so I'd kill off some apps and free up 100+. That makes a pretty big difference when navigating the phone to me, so I was fine doing it.

Now with Froyo, they've made some memory management tweaks because I don't dip below 100MB of free memory anymore, so I've not been using ATK a much.

People warn against using a task killer, but really, it's the user's fault if there are issues, because they don't know what they're killing or use one of the presets without doing some research.

 

[Jerry-O]

I dont think you are going to like my answers but you will find that they both have a large group of followers in this camp...

Battery monitors are notoriously inaccurate I play lets golf or any taxing game for several hours a day some days (more than 100 minutes worth) and the phone has never shut off. Base your battery life on experience not on a monitor. They are an OK guide but that is all.

Task killers are unnecessary. You are using your microsoft brain when looking at this issue. Yes it is annoying that tasks show they are running in the background when you are not using them (especially microsoft brain people) but your phone will free up resources when you need it. Force closing an app that is using 10% of your resources will not make your phone run 10% faster. You will just have 10% more usable resources available for another app to use. The system will not use it until you launch another app and the space is needed in which case it would have closed the older app anyway.

pwnst_r is right that if you know what you are doing you can use a task killer but there is little benefit other than self satisfaction unless you have a rogue app that needs to be stopped.

 

[dwhitman]

But my big question is why are these programs even running in the background of my device? Would it really be that big of an issue that a program have in the menu and option to exit, and when you do the program is done, finished, not running in the background.

Sort of semantics, but I think part of the problem is your use of the phrase "running in the background".

You've got a lot of memory on your phone. It's there to use, and Android likes to keep stuff loaded there for fast access. Being in memory isn't the same as "running in the background" - a lot of stuff is just sitting there either because you used it recently, or the program asked to be preloaded against possible use. It's not consuming CPU or anything other than memory, and the memory can be overwritten by Android at any time if it's needed for something else.

There's also a lot of stuff loaded in memory that's just passively waiting for a message to do something, and again, not running and consuming CPU, but available to do work if Android calls on it - and again, able to be overwritten if something else needs the memory.

Now of course there are programs that can and do run in the background, slowing your phone and chewing up your battery. But you should deal with those through settings - tell them not to auto-update, etc.

But just seeing something in a list of programs currently in memory doesn't mean it's doing any harm by being there. It's just Android trying to keep things fast for you.