Android stability ? Is multitasking a concern?

[dedroid]

I have had the Motorola Droid since its launch and I have found that occasionally I will miss calls. Not a whole lot mind you but I have on occasion received an alert that I missed a call yet my phone never even rang. This alert has taken two forms. Once it was an actual missed call alert and two times it was a voice mail that someone left after I didn?t answer the call. In all of these cases I was I was in a location where I receive calls all the time yet my phone didn?t ring. What I am wondering is if the Droid could have somehow been in a low memory state or perhaps the CPU was busy and the call was just ignored or sent to voice mail.

What concerns me is the fact that certain applications just start up on their own, in the background, on the Droid. Applications that I don?t ever initiate. One example might be the Alarm Clock program. I don?t have an alarm set yet when I check my background tasks it is there. Other programs that appear like this are ?Settings?, ?Calendar?, and ?Messaging?. I do have a task manager installed. I use ?Advanced Task Manager? and it seems to work well in closing programs. However, I am still a bit concerned that maybe these background applications might be causing some instability on my phone.

Has anyone else experienced the same missed calls with the Droid? Thank you for any thoughts or suggestions.

 

[entwined82]

Don't use the task manager. It causes more harm than good. Even if the apps are running it knows not to really use them. Linux behaves differently than you're used to I guess.

Oddly enough, your habit of killing tasks could be contributing to weird issues like this. The instability can come from killing off tasks that need to be running, or can run without causing harm and taking up any space really. This isn't a blackberry, you can let it go and it'll manage itself.

See if that fixes it, otherwise it could just be an area of bad signal, I find pockets like that in random locations.

 

[seanubis]

Don't use the task manager. It causes more harm than good. Even if the apps are running it knows not to really use them. Linux behaves differently than you're used to I guess.

Oddly enough, your habit of killing tasks could be contributing to weird issues like this. The instability can come from killing off tasks that need to be running, or can run without causing harm and taking up any space really. This isn't a blackberry, you can let it go and it'll manage itself.

See if that fixes it, otherwise it could just be an area of bad signal, I find pockets like that in random locations.

Good advice! The VZW rep who sold me my phone did me the "favor" of installing TaskKiller in advance, which led to two weeks of frustration due to continuous reboots and other weirdness. All of that was solved by removing the task manager!

 

[dodgylegs]

Don't use the task manager. It causes more harm than good. Even if the apps are running it knows not to really use them. Linux behaves differently than you're used to I guess.

Oddly enough, your habit of killing tasks could be contributing to weird issues like this. The instability can come from killing off tasks that need to be running, or can run without causing harm and taking up any space really. This isn't a blackberry, you can let it go and it'll manage itself.

See if that fixes it, otherwise it could just be an area of bad signal, I find pockets like that in random locations.

Thank you for this. I read it at the right time - I've had a weekend of strangeness with my Milestone/Droid. Every time I went to make a call and put the phone to my ear - the call cut out - and random reboots as well yesterday. I was using Task Panel. In the end, because of not being able to make any calls (for some reason, it was fine on speaker phone) I ended up doing a hard reset and lost everything on the phone. I reinstalled as many apps as I could remember, including Task Panel, and it seemed to take an age to reboot - and then read this. I've decided to unistall it to see how I go.

I hope my problems are over - I'll let you know if any other problems arise.

But thank you for explaining how the task killers work. Appreciated.

 

[takeshi]

I have had the Motorola Droid since its launch and I have found that occasionally I will miss calls. Not a whole lot mind you but I have on occasion received an alert that I missed a call yet my phone never even rang.

Were you actively using data at the time?

 

[BerkleyJ]

I read about how task manager probably do more harm than good, but I think im gonna keep taping the Advance Task Manger widget every time I lock my phone until this weird stuff you guys are talking about starts happening.

 

[entwined82]

Were you actively using data at the time?

That shouldn't be an issue anymore. It was early on, I believe on the 2/2.5G phones..but the latest 3G devices can now end the data session and receive the phone call.