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Battery killing apps

L

LASJayhawk

Lurker
I'm still new to the whole smarter than the user phone thing, so if this seems stupid, I'm sorry. After doing the airplane mode on and off thing I can get 3 or 4 days out of my battery unless I use the following apps. If I use them figure 4 hours :(

Skype:
I really want Skype on the phone, so I can sms a friend in Costa Rica. But with Skype on the phone the battery is dead if I don't go in and manually kill everything Skype.

Where: (included with phone)
Same story, once you use Where it wants to follow your every move and kills the battery in short order. I can turn off the GPS but then where is useless if it doesn't know where I am.

I guess what I'm asking is there a way to make these apps user friendly and still be battery friendly? I don't want to have to go into menus to kill these things off, I just want to use them and when I'm done, have them leave my battery alone.

Also, anybody with battery vampire apps like these please post here too, it would be nice to have a thread of warnings and fixes for common applications. Shoot maybe there is a way to exit Where like the Dolphin browser does so I can use the app and kill it without extra steps.

Thanks, John
 
Where is a terrible program and the best thing to do would be to root and uninstall it. If you can't do that, simply don't start it. If you wish to use it I'm not sure of any easy way to get it to "stop". Where also takes up a sizable amount of phone storage and can't be moved to the SD card so that makes it doubly bad.

Personally, my biggest pain in the butt program is Google's Navigation. It is a great program to get you to your destination but even when I exit it my battery remains very hot as it must still be running in the background killing my battery.

JD
 
In Android's defense, the system does a mind-boggling amount of work in the background. Updating information, managing the system and performing all of the eye candy that people wow over takes a lot of power and the manufacturer's penchant for keeping these phones as thin as possible isn't very battery-friendly in my opinion. I wouldn't mind an extra 1/8 to 1/4 of an inch of phone body if it meant including a more powerful battery.

Though I haven't used it yet, I hear lots of people rave over Juice Defender. And one of the most power-saving things I have found is to turn off all sync and manually sync in an app that needs it when it's launched. Sure, it's an extra step but it's worth it if it extends the battery life.
 
I used to be one of those people raving about Juice Defender. One day I decided to stop it to diagnose another problem and guess what? Same battery life without it. I don't know if installing JD originally coincided with me fixing something else on my phone or what but suffice it to say it's not nearly what it's cracked up to be - IMHO.
 
I've been pretty satisfied with a free app called "Advanced Task Killer" I set it up with auto kill level to "crazy" and auto kill frequency to "when screen off" It's worked well for me.
 
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