MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - Impressions and a couple ??s from a new droid user

muranternet · 07-10-2011, 06:02 PM

Closing programs: Force Close works, and is usually the last line of defense against a puking application. I know Angry Birds exits by going back to the primary screen and pressing the Back button (hardware); most apps work the same way. I haven't tried one yet, but there are a number of autoclose programs for Android that monitor unused programs and kill them periodically, mostly to preserve memory.

I also run in airplane mode. I don't know if it helps; at best, it may be freeing up CPU cycles where Ermine tries to poll a nonexistent 3G antenna.

I haven't tried Bluetooth yet in Ermine.

There's no 3G, so the 3G options won't do anything. It's just a standard component of Android, which is at its heart a cell phone OS.

I personally believe the battery usage meter is not displaying correctly. It always shows cell phone standby as a primary draw, but on almost every Android device the primary draw is actually the backlight.

The battery life is pretty bad. The most important thing you can do to increase it is to turn down the default brightness on your screen, and turn off your WiFi antenna when you're not using it. (Bluetooth is also incredibly piggy with power.) If you load up the Power widget on a homescreen, you can turn these things on and off with a touch. I also added the WiFi supplicant interval line to build.prop to reduce the amount of polling my antenna does, but that's less important. I also turned off all the animations, more to avoid any sort of component failure than to save power, but it does save a little.

07-10-2011, 06:02 PM	#2
muranternet Connoisseur Posts: 75 Karma: 10 Join Date: May 2011 Device: Kindle 3/Sony PRS-300/Nook Color running CM7/P eDGe	Closing programs: Force Close works, and is usually the last line of defense against a puking application. I know Angry Birds exits by going back to the primary screen and pressing the Back button (hardware); most apps work the same way. I haven't tried one yet, but there are a number of autoclose programs for Android that monitor unused programs and kill them periodically, mostly to preserve memory. I also run in airplane mode. I don't know if it helps; at best, it may be freeing up CPU cycles where Ermine tries to poll a nonexistent 3G antenna. I haven't tried Bluetooth yet in Ermine. There's no 3G, so the 3G options won't do anything. It's just a standard component of Android, which is at its heart a cell phone OS. I personally believe the battery usage meter is not displaying correctly. It always shows cell phone standby as a primary draw, but on almost every Android device the primary draw is actually the backlight. The battery life is pretty bad. The most important thing you can do to increase it is to turn down the default brightness on your screen, and turn off your WiFi antenna when you're not using it. (Bluetooth is also incredibly piggy with power.) If you load up the Power widget on a homescreen, you can turn these things on and off with a touch. I also added the WiFi supplicant interval line to build.prop to reduce the amount of polling my antenna does, but that's less important. I also turned off all the animations, more to avoid any sort of component failure than to save power, but it does save a little.