I doubt battery life would be hindered too much, but performance might be. It depends on what you have. Widgets like weather, RSS feeds, etc. can affect the smoothness of scrolling through screens.

Personally, I have something on all 5 screens. Home screen is the BLUR status, weather, messaging, and news widgets, and shortcuts to the Browser and My Account apps. Left most screen is filled to capacity with shortcuts to games (what can I say? I love my games!), left of the home screen is one big widget for MixZing, my preferred music player. Right most screen is just the Kill All widget for Taskiller, and right of the home screen is Google search, Astrid to-do list, and Calendar.

 

It is needed, because alot of apps like to stay open. Some apps are nice and have a "Close" function, but others, not so much. I can easily go from 60MB to ~110MB of free memory with one tap of the kill all button. It definitely helps.

 

I mean no dis-respect but, are you checking this "free memory" via task killer or through the phones system menu ?

I have been wanting to ask some one this for a few reasons and some people get defensive when you tell them they dont need a task iller.

1. The Android operating system shuts off apps if the memory becomes low enough to cause issues.

2. The only way I have been able to incress memory (system menu) is to clear the cache or uninstall apps.

3. Some apps do run in the background, but all of those you can turn off "sync" for the app and they wont run. example ... Gmail-if you turn off sync it wont run in background.

4. I used Task Killer and it drained battery because it was always on and took up space I could use for another app.

 

I don't know about you, but even without the numbers, I definitely notice a difference in performance after I kill everything. Scrolling through screens is the easiest indicator, it'll be choppy scrolling to the screen with the Kill All widget, but I kill everything and bam, smooth as silk.

And it'll stay that way as long as I don't open a bunch of apps, so I know it's not the background data eating up memory, it's unclosed apps. I have most of the sync features (other than MOTOBLUR) off anyway.

And I've been checking the memory usage through Taskiller, to answer your question.

Edit: One more thing.. my battery lasts a good 15+ hours with moderate usage. That is, music a lot of the day, texting, Facebook (through the browser), a few calls, etc.

 

So, which task killer are you all using? It may have been mentioned and I may have just missed that portion of the thread.

 

^ TasKiller