Comment by ergo98 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ergo98 | Hacker News Reader

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>For example, Android has a running process list with an option to kill tasks on the phone.

Android does not have this. There are third party applications that do task management, however the word "placebo" applies to most advocates of them, and user task management should never be necessary. If the system needs resources it dehydrates tasks and terminates them, and this is a cardinal foundation of the platform.

The new iPhone multitasking system works in a very similar manner to how Android has always worked, it should be mentioned.

>Lack of an integrated mail tool. I really don't care so much about POP/IMAP folder integration but why do I need two email apps, one for Gmail and one for IMAP.

Because the gmail app has different features and functions?

> Deleting an app is quite possibly the most unintuitive thing on the whole phone.

Now this is just weird. The most obviously way to uninstall an app is to simply go into downloads (where you installed it) and pick uninstall. The second to go into applications in settings and uninstall.

Your gripes are seemingly that you've been mentally debilitated by using the iPhone, and now you use everything relative to how the iPhone works.

>Android does not have this.

If I go to "Applications > Settings > Running Services" on a stock 2.1 Android phone I get a list of running tasks with their corresponding package names. Tapping one of them terminates the task. It's not "top" but it's still pretty close to a process manager.

A user shouldn't have to care that "com.google.process.gapps" is running "MailSyncAdapterService."

>Because the gmail app has different features and functions?

OK, that's fair, so merge them into one app and have it display gmail accounts in an enhanced manner. It simply seems counterintuitive to have two applications for the task of reading email.

>I get a list of running tasks with their corresponding package names

That gives you get a list of running services. Further, in no way is a user ever directed to go there for any reason. You have no reason to ever go into that screen.

The reason I have is killing tasks like Camera, which appear to chew away at the battery even as they sit in the background... It wasn't until I started using a task manager that I started getting decent battery life out of my N1.

The first week, I followed the party line- I didn't touch a task manager. And the first week I was seeing 20% of my battery drained by 10 AM in the morning while using it for under 15 minutes since I pulled it off the charger.

The placebo effect is remarkably powerful, so I know I'm not going to convince you. However let me say that I took my phone off the charger at 8:30am, and right now my battery is at around 95%.

I never manage processes or services. I use apps and leave them and allow Android to manage the lifecycle.

Sure I do. I use it to kill the exchange email sync, because it triples battery usage even when I have it set to not sync (I believe this has something to do with the fact that it's just scraping Outlook Web Access, not actually connecting with Exchange, which is impossible outside of the firewall.)

And I use it for this sort of thing frequently. Most services pull down battery life considerably.

>I believe this has something to do with the fact that it's just scraping Outlook Web Access, not actually connecting with Exchange

It communicates with Exchange Web Services, just like every other Exchange integrating smartphone product. It isn't "scraping Outlook".

>And I use it for this sort of thing frequently.

I've never, ever touched it.

>Most services pull down battery life considerably.

Sure. How, exactly, have you measured this?

I have, generally speaking, three services up:

- GTalk

- Android Keyboard .

- BatteryLife

With these services up, my Droid loses maybe 40% of its battery life in a day (with minimal usage.)

While I sleep, it rarely consumes more than 10%. The counterexamples have been when I've left the Pandora Service running, as well as the Email Sync service.

So, I test it by enabling the service, changing nothing else about my usage, and watching my battery life take a nosedive.

And on the subject of what exactly it's doing, that's roughly the explanation I got from my friends on the Windows side. We have Exchange disabled outside the firewall, so my phone has to hit up OWA to get the data. Is Exchange Web Services an API available from OWA, but separate from the HTML? It's my understanding that my phone is in fact scraping the HTML.

There's 4 different interfaces that use the same OWA URL but function completely differently. There's the web based email that people typically think of when someone says "OWA". There's WebDAV, which uses HTTP or form based authentication (to pick up the proper cookies) and then uses special URLs and WebDAV HTTP verbs to perform actions relative to retrieving/sending mail, listings, calendar, etc (this is in the process of being deprecated I believe). There's Web Services, which is (if I remember correctly) a SOAP API that provides the same functionality as WebDAV (and some additional functionality) which has become the preferred method as of Exchange 2007. There's ActiveSync, which uses WBXML formatted message passing (it's more complicated, but more robust than WebDAV and Web Services). If you're using k9mail to talk to an Exchange server, it uses WebDAV. If you're using the "Work Email" app, it will use ActiveSync, Web Services and WebDAV, depending on which is enabled. If you're using TouchDown, it will use whichever of the three you select.

Frequently in configurations, WebDAV access, Web Services access and ActiveSync are all enabled when OWA is enabled for the Exchange server. It is only in rare conditions when you will see OWA enabled and not one of the three.

> If the system needs resources it dehydrates tasks and terminates them

Has the OS been fixed such that it monitors CPU and network radio usage by background processes? Task killing isn't done to reclaim the RAM (which, as you note, the OS handles itself), it's to ensure that poorly-written programs don't waste your battery without your control or knowledge.

iPhoneOS 4.0 gets around this by only allowing apps in the background to use a tightly defined set of APIs, the actual processing code of which is written entirely by Apple, so they have full control over their effect on battery life.

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