Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 29th Apr 2013 21:06 UTC
Oh multitasking. That staple of computing that got thrown out the window with many modern smartphones. We got some rudimentary thing in its place - but even as multitasking on phone and tablets improves, its user-visible side remains cumbersome. Windows 8 has a neat implementation, and now it's time Android follows in it footsteps.
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Member since:
2005-07-06
Having owned a Pre2 since 2011 (and a Pre3 for a bit over a month), I think that the effects of multi-tasking on battery life are a bit overstated. I think that reputation is due more to the small size of the pre-Pre3 (if you'll excuse the pun) phones, and the constraints that put on the battery size/capacity. I don't know the specs offhand, but I'd wager that the iPhone & typical Android phones had significantly higher-capacity batteries.
Going from the Pre2 to the Pre3 (which is rough the same size as iPhones pre-iPhone5), the improvement in battery life has been dramatic. On standby, I'm getting close to 3 days of battery life with the 3, with regular use I get at least a day and half. Granted, my normal use is probably light by the standard of many smartphone users, I don't use any social media services, etc (already get enough spam through EMail, not desire to have Facebook or LinkedIn spam added to the pile).
Even then, I typically got at least a day out of the Pre2's battery. And one the nice things about the "openness" of webOS was that it was trivially simple to install a replacement kernel with better power management support, along with an app called "Govnah" which allows things like automatically scaling back the CPU frequency when the remaining battery life hits a certain point.