AH1z

I have a few questions about Task managers. At the moment I'm using ES Task manager. It works well and has a nice interface. My questions are...

A) Does the Android OS even need a task manager?
Some say their not needed. The ones I've used do clear out tasks, frees up memory, and saves on the systems load.

B) What tasks should I clear?
Lets say for example I killed voice mail at startup. Does this mean If someone called I would not receive voice mail until I reloaded the voice mail app, or would the phone see a voice mail is incoming and reload the program?

Device
htc evo 4g
2.1 OS

OfTheDamned

A) - As many people use them, no. The software is designed to manage itself more or less. Task Killers can come in handy, however, if you have applications that are not playing nice with your phone. Apps that lock up or cause other problems can be stopped with a task killer. The real question becomes, why would you want something that isn't going to function properly on your phone in the first place? Also, when people use task killers to "free up" memory they are only doing it for a short period of time. With Sense UI, like your EVO, there are going to be apps that open in the background and run regardless of you wanting them there or not. They are incorporated into the OS and killing them most of the time will just cause Sense to restart. This starts those apps up again and just wastes battery life in the process.

B) I don't use the native voicemail app on my phone so take this with a grain of salt. I would imagine the voicemail would still exist, but that you would not be notified that it is there or that the app would not receive it at all. As far as which tasks you should kill, that really depends on the overall goal for killing them in the first place as well as what you have on the phone.


I'm curios though, is your EVO running slow or freezing up?

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AH1z

Thanks for the reply.

No the evo isn't exactly running slow. My goal was to set the phone up like a custom built desktop would be. For example. When I boot my phone I get 30 apps that load, some I want (ie. voice-mail) and some I don't (ie. sprint football). I use my phone for getting stuff done more than for entertainment... These base apps take up a nice chunk of memory so I use the task killer to stop over half of them leaving me with about 240 MB after the startup kill. I'm then left with 2 problems.

One: As I use the phone, even if I just have my ignore list running the overall memory drops. Old cached tasks are still bound up on the systems memory and are not cleanable unless I use a more detailed tool like System Panel. These could be tasks like Appbrain or market.

The second problem is what should I kill? For example I wouldn't want the MMS program killed if I might miss messages, and on the other hand if the phone can still receive messages with the program killed to start with I might want it stopped if not in use.

Ideally I'd like to get rid of all this bloat-ware but my phones not rooted and I don't want to mess with the warranty. So the only thing left is to manage the software as best I can.

Last edited by AH1z; July 30th, 2010 at 05:01 PM.