Keeping Your Android Lean And Healthy
Image by XDA Developers
Smartphones are power-mad devices. Well, not exactly power-mad. Rather, smartphones are power-sapping gadgets. With the exception of the Blackberry and the iPhone, most other smartphones sap batteries quickly. And some models of the Android are not an exception.
Android, being an Open Source platform, will have differences across devices, depending on how the manufacturers decided to implement the OS. Thus, if you've noticed that the Android you purchased seems to be draining too quickly, maybe it's time to find battery-saving apps.
Aside from battery savers, a good practice for the Android would be to keep Task Killers. A Task Killer is an app that will allow you to force applications to shut down. This not only saves your battery life, it also frees up CPU and memory usage, making your Android faster to use.
If there are a few functions that an Android user has to look out for in a good batt-saving, task-management app, it should be:
- Task Killer function, to free up resources.
- Autokill function, to regularly schedule task-killing.
- Startup Manager, to kill apps upon startup. Most Android apps turn on upon the gadget's startup, so you'd have to set an autokill for the phone's startup.
- One-click task kill or resource-boost widget.
These are the apps we highly recommend for task-killing and battery-saving:
Android Assistant. It has a Startup Manager, task killer, and you may tweak your phone's performance settings using this. You can also give your phone a "quick boost" through its widget or "Quick Boost" button, which you can mount on one of your home screens. With one click, you can free up your phone's resources. The startup manager will let you set the app to kill other apps that startup automatically on login. It also has a Cache Cleaner, System Cleaner, Batch Uninstall function, File Manager, and even detailed charts for your battery and resource use. It's a comprehensive app that only has the autokill and the one-click task killing functions missing.
Battery Saver - PowerDefender. This one has a task killer, autokill (lets you schedule a regular "killing" of your apps), as well as lets you tweak your phone's settings to maximize battery life. Don't let the app's theme put you off. It may look a little kitschy, but this app is useful, powerful and does the job, too. It also comes with a cute one-click-to-kill-power-sapping-apps widget. Taking up only 939kb, if you don't particularly care about having your apps killed on startup, this will suffice.
Battery Dr Saver (+Task Killer). It has a beautiful interface and interesting, practical battery use graphs. Instead of just giving you percentages of what's left on your phone's battery, the Battery Dr. Saver gives you the time you have left if you listen to music, use WiFi, 3G, and other processes. And it has a task-killing widget as well. The only thing missing is the startup manager function.
There are other task killers and battery savers out there, but these are the apps that we've seen that pack more power into its punch, so to speak. When we come across one "super app" that has everything: Task Killer, Autokill, Startup Manager, one-click widgets, you'll be the first to know!
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