Help Spare Parts - What exactly is "Partial Wake"??

[scudder]

Hello...

Been trying to assess my battery usage, fooling around with a few apps to tell me information (e.g., Spare Parts) and some other apps to control battery usage and connectivity (e.g., Juice Defender).

Anyway, been monitoring this "partial wake usage" in Spare Parts...don't see anything out of the ordinary but was wondering what precisely "partial wake usage" is?? I'm kinda guessing it has to do with a tally of the activities that keeps the phone from sleeping. One can then use the information to see if there is a runaway app keeping the phone "on"-ish all the time and sucking your battery. Am I close??

THANKS!

 

[akazabam]

Right, so your phone has different "states", basically. When the screen is on, the phone is awake. Once you turn the screen off, the phone should go to sleep. That means most processes are just suspended. The phone is theoretically unusable in such a state, but it doesn't matter much. The point is, to make the phone usable, it must wake up. Since the screen is off, for the phone to do something, it must wake up, and hold a wake lock. While an app holds a wake lock, the phone will be awake, and the app can do whatever it needs to. The app is *supposed* to release the wake lock when it's done so that the phone can sleep again. Sometimes that doesn't always happen or the app is just poorly written. When that happens, the wake lock remains, and the app keeps the phone awake. When you check partial wake usage in spare parts, you're seeing a list of apps that held wake locks. This is normal, as certain things still need to run while you're not using the phone. If you see, however, that an app has held a wake lock for way longer than it should have (most things that run with the screen off should take only a few minutes over a period of several hours), then there's a problem with it, as it never released its wake lock, or even worse, held the wake lock because it's actually still doing something.