What's all the rage about taskillers? I had one for a while on my Motorola Droid and it didn't run any different. I think the phone runs just fine without it.
I keep a taskkiller around just for the times when the phone may slow down a little. It never gets uncomfortably slow, but if I've been using a lot of apps and playing with it for a while, a good cleanout of running apps actually does make a difference. It helps with battery life as well, though not to a large extent.
Agreed. It actually is an important little tool to keep around, especially if you are like me and spend many hours of the day on your handset and need to close up some of those running programs quickly. I think that anyone using a handset with android would want to keep one of these around. I simply use TaskManager.
For the most part I agree. Unused memory is wasted memory. There are a few times where freeing up additional memory helps though. For example, some apps like Camera Zoom FX specifically suggest killing unused apps before using the program since they require a lot. It would be better if we just had some sort of service manager to simply disable things.
If you were using ATK to autokill that's completely different. Monitoring apps constantly is clearly going to use more battery. Occasionally killing a batch of apps manually isn't going to affect battery.
You guys do realise that the same amount of battery power is used whether 2MB or 100MB of RAM is in use, don't you? The RAM is either powered up or it is not. Also, apps that are not in the foreground shouldn't be using any CPU time and therefore no extra battery power. I used to use a task killer, but stopped because I was tired of obsessively closing down apps after use and I have noticed no overall decrease in battery life or performance. Android is perfectly capable of managing it's own resources and freeing up RAM when it is needed. In my opinion task killers have a largely placebo effect (the user sees a larger amount of free RAM and believes their phone is running better/faster because of that number).
Every time I see one of these discussions it's always a back and forth about whether or not task killing apps save battery life. Whether or not they actually do seems, at this point, to be based largely on anecdotal evidence. Forget about battery life for a second. If you leave your data connection on all the time (the APNs) and/or always have your WiFi on to connect whenever a WiFi spot is near, _and_ you have apps in the BG, some of those apps may be, or are, connecting to servers and transferring data back and forth while you o about your merry day. _This_ is the main reason I use a task killing app. I want as much control over my phone as possible. Not only do I have my APNs and WiFi turned off until I want to use them, I kill BG apps so that I know they aren't doing anything I don't want them to do.
That's true, the memory needs power to work anyways. I think its a good idea to have one like the one that comes with astro or es just in case, but I haven't found any reason to use it yet.
^ This. I just use the free version of ATK (no paid apps in Ireland yet, get the finger out Google). Every once in a while, if the phone's feeling a bit sluggish, I just fire up ATK, and kill the unneccessary apps (including ATK itself ). It remembers which apps I untick, so it takes me two presses any time I want to do it. No overhead, no hassle, and the Android OS doesn't have to waste unnecessary CPU cycles deciding which apps to kill and when.
i used to run task killers and found my performance to always be up and down. ive since uninstalled any and all task killers and my phone's performance since then has been amazing. no lag, nice and snappy. three other things of note that I changed that might have affected speed: 1. stopped using dolphin and went back to stock HTC hero browser (pinch zoom is so much nicer in the HTC browser and it has windowed browsing... almost as good as tabbed. also seems to be a lot less laggy) 2. switched from Chomp SMS to Handcent. wow. chomp seems like a friggin pig compared to the speed of handcent. never going back to Chomp. 3. ditched the stock media player and using mixzing. love.
I use the task managers because I don't want Tweet updates and facebook updates all day. I check, I'm done, I close. What I'd love is the ability to configure certain programs to just close when I close them rather than waiting for the OS to decide the memory is needed.
