By T-Mobile’s gotten a bit proactive on the software side of things with improving device experience for their customers. They’ve been building an app called Device Tune-Up which will proactively shut unused/old services down in order to help the battery life and the phone’s overall performance.
“Device Tune-up is different from most task killers because it does not require you to do anything. Device Tune-up will default to ‘on’. While on, Device Tune-up proactively closes services to help the device and battery perform at their best. Most pre-loaded applications will not be affected by Device Tune-up. For our non-technical users, this may mean you never even realize Device Tune-up is running; your device may simply run better.”
It sounds a lot like the app AutoKiller which allows you to set profiles up to make Android more or less aggressive in automatically managing services and memory. It’s different from a traditional task killer where you don’t actually control what’s being shut down and when, rather you’re telling Android’s built-in memory and services manager that you want it to kill apps more often or less often, depending on the settings you provide.
We won’t get into the controversial debate regarding task killers and their neutral (and, according to some people, negative) effect on how well your device performs; but if you’ve followed the advice of Android’s engineers by uninstalling a task killer and you’re still itching for more efficient memory management, this is definitely worth looking into.
Get over to T-Mobile’s forums now to learn how you can test this out.
[via Android and Me]
What they should do is just stop putting so much bloated crap on their phones. This goes for all carriers.
An average EVO ROM download is around 150mb and you can install a plain froyo build the download is like 68mb. Thats around 82 mb of crap..
I shall definitely be trying this on my Nexus.
Or not, 2.1 and lower. Then again, the rate at which Froyo is being released….
Still not working.connection error
What I really don’t understand is why all apps just don’t have an exit option so you can determine which apps you want to continue to run and which you want to simply close.
@antsinmypants. If you use the back button instead of the home button it will actually close most applications, the stock browser is an exception and there are few others.
Anything that helps would be ok with me. Can’t wait to see how this will work and if it will work. Will it help battery life? We’ll see.
I have just download t-mobile device tune up so i will let u know how it is in a couple of days, I hope it is worth the hype
if you can’t get to the link make sure you put in the web address EXACTLY like they have it on the Tmob forums page. I had to put it in I mean exactly for me to be taken to the Tmobile website. Once I did that I was able to get to the page and download without a problem.
There’s a reason Android works the way it does. It was engineered from the ground up as an OS for mobile devices that would have inherently limited battery power. This problem isn’t some enormous oversight on the part of those who wrote Android. The problem in my quite-biased opinion is poorly written applications, and the solution is to find them and uninstall them.
I’ve written software that includes a task manager. Implementing auto-kilking would have been quite trivial relative to the other capabilities of the application.
My opinion of auto-killing can be found here:
http://android.nextapp.com/site/systempanel/doc/taskmanagement
And here:
http://android.nextapp.com/site/systempanel/doc/autokill
I can’t even download T-Mobile’s app at the moment, the “projps.t-mobile.com” site is inaccessible. I hope T-Mobile is doing something different and unique here, rather than the ham-handed auto-task killing approach which has been a popular seller on the Android market. From what I can see, they’re just auto-killing like everyone else, and if so I’m horrified that T-Mobile would sponsor such an item.
I was able to download and install today. I will see if battery life is any better over the weekend.
I also can’t download it.
Quentyn I wish you WOULD get into the issue of task killers. I’ve seen some superficial coverage, but I would love to see a deep article on the nature of task killers and android.
thanks,
don