JuiceDefender

[Fizban22]

im checking out this app, but im not fully sure of what it does/if itll help.

on my phone, i have my email set to fetch every 30min. i do have facebook, but not the widget. no twitter account at all. i do have weatherbug elite set to update every 1 hour.

so... with JuiceDefender (set to check for 1 min every 15min), is it worth it to actually have? i notice that its always running in the background (much like app killers) and i heard app killers do more harm than help b/c of them running constantly.

my question is, will JuiceDefender actually help (with my email/etc being updated every half hour or hour) or will it kill the phone quicker by always running?

 

[stryguy]

The problem with app killers is that most people use them to kill apps that will just automatically restart themselves. Loading an app from storage memory into ram and have it read all of it's settings etc is not easy on the battery.

Take "Gtalk Service" at 7.7mb it's a fairly large program. You kill it and it restarts.. and then it goes and checks the Gtalk server to see if it missed anything while it was down.

Download System Panel. It will show you each process running on your machine and how much cpu / battery that process has taken since your last reboot. You'll see that if you leave Gtalk alone and just let it run it never actually uses cpu. Maybe 2 seconds a day total.. But if you go and kill it and it constantly has to restart itself? Well then it's going to take 20 seconds here.. 30 seconds there. Until you'll finally see 6% of your battery was used by restarting Gtalk.


JuiceDefender is a whole different beast. You see, I had an Iphone and for some reason I could leave that Iphone on for 2 days straight on it's tiny 1300ma battery and still have 30% of the battery remaining going into day #2. You know why? NOTHING could be running in the background using data connections. When you turned off the screen it turns off Wifi + GPS and only allows 3g to run for email pulls and pushes.

On the flip side our Droid X will allow you to do damn near anything. You can have Social Networking polling for updates every 30 seconds if you want. You can have MSN messenger up nonstop and keep an active data connection to the server even. Then people are surprised their battery doesn't last.

JuiceDefender just corrects the mistakes / lack of configuration settings / or rogue apps from destroying your battery by using your data connections. Does it come with a battery overhead, definitely. Turning on/off data connections takes some CPU time.