Task Killers Put to the Test

Post Reply
User avatar
silentj
Possible Ally of Robinhood
Possible Ally of Robinhood
Posts: 137
Joined: Mon Nov 17, 2008 1:09 am
Location: live oak,fl
Contact:

Task Killers Put to the Test

Post by silentj »

Task Killers Put to the Test, Do They Actually Extend Battery Life? As Expected, They Most Certainly Do Not

by:Kellex DROID LIFE

Image

This has bean written about a number of times, the idea that task killers on Android do not help battery, no matter what that carrier rep who
sold you your new phone has told you. In general, most of us look at Android as a multi-tasking platform that likes to have activities in the
background to make your phone perform faster and more efficiently. By constantly killing off apps, you are working against what the OS is trying to do,
hence the reason task killers are evil.

On the flip side, there are Android users who continue to believe that task killers are helping their phone no matter what we or a variety of devs tell them.
They are addicted to killing apps and have convinced themselves that it will only help out the battery technology from 1952 that is stuck in their phone.

To settle the argument once and for all, PCWorld took to their “labs” to test a handful of phones and decide once and for all if task killers will extend the
life of your phone. The verdict? They won’t.

Image

According to their results, HTC phones saw upwards of 17 minutes of extra battery life with a task killer, but I think we can all guess why. Sense has
more background syncs and tasks running than any other skin on the planet and probably could see some benefits to killing off tasks from time to time.
Funny thing there, is the fact that in Sense 3.5, HTC built a task killer into the OS. The Bionic did not see a difference and maintained the same battery
life it had without a task killer. The Galaxy S2 on the other hand, saw slightly worse battery life with a task killer.

So, as the Android dev community has been trying to tell you since the introduction Froyo, a task killer is not helping you. Stop using one to try and
extend battery life, and get back to enjoying your phone.
Take It Like a champ
Image
User avatar
HaGGardSmurf
Ally of Robinhood
Ally of Robinhood
Posts: 4088
Joined: Tue Feb 03, 2009 9:46 am
Location: Alberta, Canada

Re: Task Killers Put to the Test

Post by HaGGardSmurf »

AFAIK you shouldn't be using a task killer in the later revisions of android, the OS manages it WAY better than any app can.
trailz
Board Warrior
Board Warrior
Posts: 296
Joined: Tue Aug 18, 2009 6:38 pm

Re: Task Killers Put to the Test

Post by trailz »

I see how that makes sense. If the tasks are just loaded into memory and not doing anything, they are not going to be drawing much power. The memory chip draws the same amount of power whether you are using 1MB or 100MB. The task manager on the other hand is constantly polling the OS for all those statistics on running programs. Depending on how frequently it does this, it can become a pretty power hungry task by itself. Task killers should be only used to kill misbehaving programs. The biggest power loads on phones will continue to be the backlight and the antennas for a long time to come.
But there's no sense crying over every mistake,
you just keep on trying 'till you run out of cake.
Post Reply

Return to “Cell phone News”