Thanks. I think I might start pricing decent alternatives now, my upgrade is like a really long way away (share a plan w/my family, limited upgrades, etc.)
So I've had my Droid 2 since... February? And I've noticed a constant, slow decrease in the performance of it. It definitely is not performing the same as it has been months ago. I don't have any Task Killer Apps, I have Superuser'd and overclocked it, but that was mostly in response to the fact that it was getting so slow. Sometimes it works fine, others it completely freezes up when doing something like texting. Is there any way to combat this? I keep thinking Windows (wipe and reinstall), but I know that the Android OS doesn't work like that. Anybody having similar issues?
Oops, can't edit: What I've done after searching around- Cleared the Dalvik-cache, and installed Cachemate, which just wipes the normal cache whenever you feel like it. It seems to have done a bit, but I haven't done a lot with the phone yet so I can't say if the changes will last long enough. If you guys have any other suggestions, that'd be great.
Doesn't the Android market list all your orders regardless if they were purchased or free? I'm unable to check at the moment, but I recall there being a list of everything I'd downloaded under my account somewhere.
When I wiped my phone, it had a list of all the apps I had paid for, but the free ones I had to go hunt down and re-download myself. I could've missed a setting or something, however.
There's that backup assistant- doesn't that just basically save all your contacts on some server somewhere? So I can wipe, and then restore them in case they arne't properly synced, correct?
In response to the iPhone 4S craze, Amazon is now offering a bunch of rather nice Android (among other kinds) phones on Verizon for just a penny with any 2 year agreement. (Link)
OK, I'm an Android noob, but I gotta ask: I downloaded the Advanced Task Killer app. I click it, it kills a bunch of stuff. However, a LOT of stuff restarts on it's own, shit I just don't use. DriveSmart, maps, music, they all seem to start on their own. Is there a way to stop that from happening? I figured by killing them, they would be done, but they are automatically turning back on within 2 or 3 minutes, tops.
So from what I've read, ATK can actually hurt your battery life since the RAM is solid state, so doesn't take energy to start back up once its in there. The CPU time is what you care about, so having to reload everything from the storage can actually be worse than if you just let it sit idle.
This is sort of correct but not for the right reasons. Solid state refers to no moving parts, and really has nothing to do with RAM which has always been solid state, and RAM does, actually, consume energy - because, while it's solid state, it is also volatile which means it needs electricity to maintain its data. Here's the thing about Android: it's got very good resource management processes all on its own. Apps that are running in the background but that don't have an actual task to attend to are sleeping, and are consuming virtually no resources. They do, however, remember their last known state, which means when you call them back up, they don't have to run through their startup sequence again. This results in good performance if you let stuff stay in memory. If I open, say, Yelp, it goes through a startup process and then lets me start interacting with it. If I hit the home button, it goes to sleep and stays resident in memory. Next time I need Yelp, Android wakes the process up and it doesn't need to do the startup sequence again. This does consume memory, but free memory is wasted memory. What good is it doing having hundreds of megs of unused memory? These aren't desktop apps that require giant chunks of memory and might page to the hard drive without enough free. So Android lets the memory fill up, and when it runs out and needs something, it will kill off a process that it has marked as low priority, or old, or whatever. So if I don't use Yelp the rest of the day, Android might kill it off at some point to reclaim resources. Task killers often harm battery life because they're always killing these processes that are not using resources, and then they use MORE resources next time they start. It's even worse for these resident processes because you kill them, and they just restart automatically. Don't use task killers. Uninstall apps if you don't want them to run or if they are a massive battery sink - it means they're badly written. Processes that are restarting are doing so because they need to be running - let them run.
That said, there are plenty of tasks that will eat up CPU resources because they have poorly implemented sleep states, and unlike RAM, you most certainly want your CPU consumption to be low when you're not doing anything
Right, but using a task killer for that purpose is like solving a rapid oil leak by strapping a drum of oil to the roof and drip-feeding your engine. It remedies the symptom but isn't the right way to handle it. You could also just plug your phone in all day but that's not a good solution either. If you have an app that has shitty programming and is eating CPU cycles while asleep, uninstall it.
After over a year of being a dedicated Advanced Task Killer user, I've opted to delete the app and see how my phone does based on the info from this article. It seems to run pretty well and have the same battery life. I did opt to download the free version of an app called Watchdog. It monitors your apps to see if any are running wild, needlessly sucking up CPU usage, so you can selectively target and shut them down. So far I haven't even had to use it. In the end I will probably just root my phone so I can prevent the apps I never use from even launching.
Please let us know how this works out, if its decent and the battery is fine, I'm going to do the same.
Side note: If you buy a 4G phone do yourself a favor and buy the extended battery or a spare with a charger that will charge two batteries at once. By the time you're putting down $200 for a phone and $1000+ a year for service, you'll save yourself unknown agony by spending $50 on more battery. Nothing worse than having your GPS crap out, being stranded and can't call, airport delays with no entertainment, losing your friends at end of night drinking, etc. Maybe I'm tethered to mine, but I would pay that $50 2 or 3 more times for the value I've gotten out of it. Some of the newer phones may have slightly better battery life, but we're probably still on first gen chips for 4G.
After hearing how the new version of Android OS isn't coming to my Nexus One, I decided to root mine and put CynanogenMod on it. Like most home brew software hacks, there have been some teething issues (most notably installing a CPU overclocker and making my phone shit itself). The mod itself is pretty amazing. My phone feels faster and much more responsive. You can uninstall pretty much everything or move it to your SD card to save internal memory. The highlight for me was finding out that my 2 year old phone could connect up through HSDPA+ (through T-Mobile). Streaming porn without a hotspot has never been smoother. As far as the process of rooting your phone goes, I wouldn't recommend it unless you're comfortable with running apps in command line. It's a pain in the ass at least initially. But the rewards, I think, are worth it.
Thinking of picking up the Samsung Galaxy S II LTE, anyone have anything good or bad to say about it?