Pros and cons of removing "bloatware"?

[bladewriter]

Just to finish off what I started here: I've tried benchmarking battery life with nothing frozen (except task manager - see below) against extreme freeze (just about everything frozen that won't break the essential phone functions). I found a couple of apps on the market: Battery Benchmark (just counts the time it takes to go from 100% charge to "lights out") and AnTuTu Tester (battery test function puts a ~50% load on cpu and marks the time to get to different charge levels. Issues a "score" but I have no idea how this is computed). AnTuTu kept triggering a low battery warning in Task Manager ("this app has been running for more than 45 minutes..." dum dee dum dee dum) so I froze TM too.

Result: zero to modest battery life improvements by freezing. Lots of variability as you'd expect, but only about 7% to 10% longer battery life. In some cases it was worse. So for now I'm just going to do a minimal freeze to get rid of frivolity like VZ Navigator and City ID, and the various social media authenticators I don't use. Others may find larger improvements, so have at it. Or I may have bodged up my testing. I suspect it depends on what you freeze - freeze or delete the wrong stuff and the OS may just start thrasing around looking for missing processes.

Off to play with my new Nook Tablet (Gingerbread, rooted, CWM flashed, root-breaking OTAs blocked hopefully).

 

[Vepaot]

The way Android works, is that it frees up memory as needed to run new apps, while keeping previously opened apps in RAM for as long as needed. RAM is going to use the same amount of energy regardless of 1 megabyte or 1 gigabyte being used, because the entire chip is being utilized.

Now what will drain your battery and lower performance, is anything that is actively needing processing power. Any time the CPU is utilized, it has to go through cycles, and the CPU uses more power depending on how it needs to perform.

It's for the former reason that there is a big debate regarding task killer applications right now. The vote goes that they are good to have for force killing certain apps in situations, but to let Android close them as it needs, as turning on the phone's screen to kill apps drains your battery, plus the CPU cycling to kill apps also uses energy. And in most cases people just hit the "kill all" button, and many apps will auto-restart immediately after that...which loading them also makes the CPU cycle.