your battery issue is most likely a problem with the meter needing calibrated. just drain the battery all the way down. until you can't turn it on anymore. then charge it. do that for a few days and the meter will get calibrated and start reporting more correct usage. also check out battery left widget. most accurate reading I've found so far. i don't even pay attention to the built in battery meter anymore.

also those apps are probably running as a service not the actual app.

 

I wanted to hit on a missconception. The number of apps loaded does not have anything to do with how fast the battery is being drained. If the app isn't doing any work then the battery won't be taxed beyond the normal overhead of the device.

FYI...The memory in the device uses the same power whether it is being partially used or not. You still need power to store a "0" just like you do to store a "1"

Of course you would have to use a program that shows CPU usage in order to determine if an app is doing work. Most apps that pre-load themselves do not use any CPU cycles unless they are setup to do some automatic work.

Of course you are correct that your available memory goes down, but the Android OS will shut down apps as needed to accomodate new ones.

I only mention this because there seems to be so many posts talking about battery drain and shutting down apps and there really is very little correlation.

On the flip side using automatic task killers and the time spent manually killing tasks will use your battery more than if you didn't use them at all.

Just my $0.2c

Richard

 

Hey Richard,
Thanks for the post - that clears up some confusion (and frees up a lot of my time). I have a question though: on occasion, I'll see that my phone is dragging (esp noticed if I'm swiping between home screens, and there is significant lag). I'll open up Astro Process killer, and see that, in this instance, NFL Live is running, the Browser, the Weather Channel (which I don't use), Moxier Mail (don't use), etc may all be running (some using memory). Many of the apps I shut down reload themselves anyway - like 3 of the ones mentioned. What's your experience with this-- is it a waste of time to be shutting these down? because I do see a significant improvement in speed when I do close them out.
Also, is there a native way to check the phone's memory usage?
Thanks!

 

The only apps you need to shut down are apps that would perform background functions while alive.

 

What He Said. Idle apps not only take no CPU if they're merely loaded, and if necessary they'll get automatically garbage-collected by the system should those resources become necessary for some other program.

... see what Windows has done to folks' thinking!

 

Good points, but then again I don't want an app to be open in the bakcground after having started up when i switch my phone on that i have never and will never use (i,e pre-loaded apps).

Use an app called startup auditor to stop applications from opening on phone startup, you can find it in the market, or by scanning this qr code:

 

strange people always talking about sprint tv and moxier mail and all that apps loading by therself ive never seen em running in the background in my task manager on my phone strange some peoples phones do that others dont.

 

That's probably cause by the time you look, they've been GCed and out of the memory. Opening the browser alone might even cause that.

 

So, to beat an almost dead horse, wont killing those apps, in general, free up memory? ..even if they're not using up any of the processor (at that particular moment)?
I've definitely got a 'windows' tempered brain...

 

... but so what? If it was needed, it'd be used. Any computer will have a certain amount of memory in it, whether it's actively being used or not- if an app is just sitting there, there's just no harm. Linux' (and Dalvik, the Java Virtual Machine used in Android) can manage its memory quite well; let it do its job.