Sometimes you are away from a charger and want to conserve what you have left, or are trying to run a resource heavy app without glitches (satnav) or trying to get a big update/download faster.
I thought we could post tips that either help with speed of the device or with saving battery - particularly if you know of apps or settings that slow the running down or eat battery.
I know these are quite obvious but I'll list some anyway to get us started
Turn these off for extra speed and batt :
Wireless General
GPS (you can leave location by network on for most stuff like weather apps)
Wifi - turning it off while you're out and about saves lots o batt. I also keep network notification off completely unless I'm in a new location looking for a wifi fix.
Bluetooth - set for off and undiscoverable
Mobile network - Set it to 2G for a big boost in battery life (and I've found, if the 3G is rubbish - I know, obvious, but I recently spent 20 mins moaning of no signal at all to send a tx at a gig, then realised I could flick to 2G and was away!!)
Data Sync
Google - You can turn of Auto sync and just sync manually when you choose
Background Data - Turning this off gives a huge battery boost, but gmail won't arrive in real time, so if you're expecting important mail don't turn it off.
On the sync option, if you know contacts and calendar are not changing that often you can uncheck these and sync manually every now and then
Apps that use Data Sync
Weather - check how often the app refreshes and set it to a longer time - some weather apps are by default set to refresh every 30 mins and this might not be needed most of the time.
Twitter and Facebook widgets and apps - again check the refresh periods, also notifications will Use batt more than no notifications.
Same probably applies for Exchange Sync but I don't use it.
Sound/Display - these things will save batt when you need it.
I think having Ring AND vibe will be more batt intensive, so maybe knock off the vibrate when you want to save battery
Keep Brightness low and lower screen timeout.
Turn off Auto rotation and animations and Notification Flash
Turning keypad tones off etc will save a bit too. It all adds up.
Turning Off TouchFLO
When running CoPilot, it helps to turn off wifi and some have reported that if you can toggle the Sense UI to the ordinary Android 3 screen home this helps too (Tho I've personally not had problems) To turn off Sense UI or Touchflo 7Screen home, you need to first go to settings-applications-manage applications and look for TouchFLO then clear defaults. After this, when you go to home, you'll be offered a choice of home or TouchFlo. To toggle back to Touchflo, press the home button again. To return it to default, just check the Use by default for this action, and then make your choice.
Post anything you've found to help or hinder speed, or to drain or boost battery life
Ta Dayzee xx
Is there a widget to switch from 3G to 2G?
no, that is not a setting that can be done on a widget. all the ones that are around and claim to do it just jump you straight into mobile settings so you can toggle it yourself in two clicks instead of four....
But there is the Mobile Network one - HTC built in - when that is turned off, you can still get calls, and send txts. I use this toggle to do that - also can you not set a shortcut to do 3g to 2g only using bettercut? I'm sure you can, because you have that option in settings and bettercut can make a shortcut to any settings toggle.
Dayzee
Edit - Bettercut doesn't work with Hero Well, certainly not for creating and adding a shortcut to a system setting - will let the devs know...
Is it my imagination or does having the people widget on a home screen makes the device a little sluggish?
Is anyone else using touchdown? Not sure if that is slowing my device down and using battery a lot too?
Toggle Settings is a good app for controlling Daisys suggestions above, taskiller or Advanced Task Manager are essential for closing unwanted apps.
Couple of notes about apps that close stuff down like Taskiller and Task Manager - they can slow your fone down immediately after an end all, as the apps that need to run like TouchFlo have to restart - which they do, all by themselves - but it makes the fone prone to laggyness and force closing if you try to open stuff straight after.
If you get one that allows exclusions (I know advanced Task Manager does but dunno on others) then exclude TouchFLO and you'll get less proba after close all.
Also there were reports that one of the Taskiller apps messed with the long press home functions. Not sure on this tho...
Dayzee said:
If you get one that allows exclusions (I know advanced Task Manager does but dunno on others) then exclude TouchFLO and you'll get less proba after close all.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
With Taskkiller you also have the option to exclude programs. It also has a widget you can tap to close all (except the ignored programs) The free version only allows two apps to be ignored. Exclude TouchFlo is a good suggestion.
Ce said:
With Taskkiller you also have the option to exclude programs. It also has a widget you can tap to close all (except the ignored programs) The free version only allows two apps to be ignored. Exclude TouchFlo is a good suggestion.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Try TaskPanel, it's free and doesn't seem to have any restrictions in its exclude list. You can also add a memory threshold when TaskPanel should automatically kill applications (configured through a separate list). And finally, it registers itself as an ongoing task and starts up automatically.
TaskPanel ist great... Thanks for that Tip. Have it running in the Background and now it Kills processes that are not in my Exclude List everytime the RAM goes below 50Meg.
My Hero is now (almost) Lag-Free.
Full charge at 7am and at 5pm, battery still at 94%.
How?
Turn off background data.
jhericurls said:
Full charge at 7am and at 5pm, battery still at 94%.
How?
Turn off background data.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Background data? As in what? Mobile network?
jhericurls said:
Full charge at 7am and at 5pm, battery still at 94%.
How?
Turn off background data.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Surely that disables all the sync services etc which is really what the phone is all about!
Also the Market won't work unless background data is enabled... It will save battery but a said, many services won't work unless you update manually.
I switched this off when in France so I didn't eat up my roaming data bundle.
The Jones said:
Is it my imagination or does having the people widget on a home screen makes the device a little sluggish?
Is anyone else using touchdown? Not sure if that is slowing my device down and using battery a lot too?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Ive also noticed this also with the people widget after i removed it as well as the Clock # 8 it severely reduced the lagginess of my Hero
Hi Dayzee & co.,
If you're looking for a good way to save battery power without having to turn wifi on and off manually, check out "Y5 battery saver"
Y5 - Battery Saver is an AndroidTM application which saves your battery by turning the Wifi off in locations where you have never been connected before. The application turns Wifi back on when you are back to known location. It will remember the locations automatically. All you have to do is turn the Wifi on and connect to the known Wifi network for the first time
Really cool, and works like a charm. Ok, you need to have your GPS turned on, but at least that one is useful everywhere you are (except inside buildings, fair enough)... whereas wifi isn't. Furthermore, wifi uses up more battery than GPS.
Concerning Advanced Task Killer (awesome!), you might want to check out this thread if you're sick of having to restart your phone each time you have to sync. In a few words: always put HTC sync in the Ignore list of the program. Unchecking it won't do.
Cheers!
Stop using Peep (set it all to manual update), remove the widget and start using Twidroid.
As well as a huge reduction in battery draw, you'll find your Hero is far more responsive than is ever was before.
The last few days my Hero has not been sluggish and the battery life has increased dramatically. Set to 30 mins update just like Peep was.
Here's my tip, that works really well, for me. I've tried a myriad of task managers, but finally settled for TaskPanel. It doesn't really matter what you use, I suppose, but I found it to be one of the clearest. Furthermore, advanced task killer's and taskillers "kill all" commands seemed to randomly kill the TouchFlo process as well, even though it was "ignored"...
I've come to the conclusion that cpu load rarely is a problem on this phone (in terms of finding a reason to possible lag), unless you are watching videos (which you probably won't, since it appears to be impossible to encode videos so they don't at least slow down a bit every five seconds) or listening to music.
Instead it's the amount of memory you have free for apps to use. I have no idea why, since I also live by the credo "memory free is memory wasted", so ideally my phone would have 5 megs of ram free and everything would work great. Now for some reason, my Hero desktop starts to lag substantially (as well as other gui-elements, such as long scrolling lists) whenever my memory goes below 40 megs.
I always hated the "favourite people" widget by Htc, so I closed it day one. Maybe that's why my htc experience has been pretty positive. I also closed the desktop widgets for SMS-messages and Mail, since they can't show MMS:es or HTML-mail and since they are both ridiculously slow at flicking from one message to the next. I also threw away the novelty clocks by Htc, since they animate too often and that slows down the interface while they are moving. Instead I opted for the iPhone-like clock "digital clock widget". Just don't force kill it, since it will stop updating and you will be stuck with a beautiful clock that shows the right time once every day.
So basically, my formula for a fluid hero experience is:
* Check your free memory with TaskPanel every now and then. If it goes below 50, prepare for slowdown. If it goes below 40, go on a killingspree.
* Register TaskPanel as an "ongoing service", so it shows up in your notification drawer. Now, if you can see your notification drawer (which you can't in the browser), then instead of clicking home to close stuff, open TaskPanel (or whatever) and kill the app you are about to stop using.
* With multitasking comes responsibility. Odds are, if you ever owned an iPhone, this is something you were *****in and moanin about. "Gimme multitasking, gimme!". Well now you've got it and so, learn to use it. Everything that is slow, badly programmed or a resource hog has gotta go, unless you really really need it. Beautiful clock animating slowly? Too bad! Ditch it.
Somebody said Android wold be very good at managing resources by itself and that sounds reasonable. However, I read numerous comments about people finding this to not be the case. Maybe in version 2.0. But for now I'm stuck killing of processes myself. It works for me and makes my UI snappy. And I can keep 3-5 apps running at the same time (that are my own choices, not mandatory apps that come with the UI) without problem. I regularly have babbler, androidirc, taskpanel, market, ebuddy, redditisfun running at the same time without problem. Just kill off apps you are not going to use for a long time.
Ok, sorry to be rambling, but this is my take on the situation. It might get resolved with the Hero update or with the 2.0 version of Android. Don't know, but until then, we need some tools and wild speculation won't solve anything. If you made it through the whole message, I would appreciate your comments - especially any positive experiences you have from "letting Android do its own cleaning". It sounds a little fishy that it would be bad a first, but after about a week, things will get really snappy? What if I boot my phone? Will I have to wait a week again for things to become fast?
-JJ
Speed and battery boosting Tips
Dayzee said:
Sometimes you are away from a charger and want to conserve what you have left, or are trying to run a resource heavy app without glitches (satnav) or trying to get a big update/download faster.
I thought we could post tips that either help with speed of the device or with saving battery - particularly if you know of apps or settings that slow the running down or eat battery.
I know these are quite obvious but I'll list some anyway to get us started
Turn these off for extra speed and batt :
Wireless General
GPS (you can leave location by network on for most stuff like weather apps)
Wifi - turning it off while you're out and about saves lots o batt. I also keep network notification off completely unless I'm in a new location looking for a wifi fix.
Bluetooth - set for off and undiscoverable
Mobile network - Set it to 2G for a big boost in battery life (and I've found, if the 3G is rubbish - I know, obvious, but I recently spent 20 mins moaning of no signal at all to send a tx at a gig, then realised I could flick to 2G and was away!!)
Data Sync
Google - You can turn of Auto sync and just sync manually when you choose
Background Data - Turning this off gives a huge battery boost, but gmail won't arrive in real time, so if you're expecting important mail don't turn it off.
On the sync option, if you know contacts and calendar are not changing that often you can uncheck these and sync manually every now and then
Apps that use Data Sync
Weather - check how often the app refreshes and set it to a longer time - some weather apps are by default set to refresh every 30 mins and this might not be needed most of the time.
Twitter and Facebook widgets and apps - again check the refresh periods, also notifications will Use batt more than no notifications.
Same probably applies for Exchange Sync but I don't use it.
Sound/Display - these things will save batt when you need it.
I think having Ring AND vibe will be more batt intensive, so maybe knock off the vibrate when you want to save battery
Keep Brightness low and lower screen timeout.
Turn off Auto rotation and animations and Notification Flash
Turning keypad tones off etc will save a bit too. It all adds up.
Turning Off TouchFLO
When running CoPilot, it helps to turn off wifi and some have reported that if you can toggle the Sense UI to the ordinary Android 3 screen home this helps too (Tho I've personally not had problems) To turn off Sense UI or Touchflo 7Screen home, you need to first go to settings-applications-manage applications and look for TouchFLO then clear defaults. After this, when you go to home, you'll be offered a choice of home or TouchFlo. To toggle back to Touchflo, press the home button again. To return it to default, just check the Use by default for this action, and then make your choice.
Post anything you've found to help or hinder speed, or to drain or boost battery life
Ta Dayzee xx
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
turning off allmost every things,then what reson to have a smart phone and spend 600$ for the device better, turn off your hero and keep in the pocket and turn it back on to use...keep in pocket with power off till next use.this is not the sulution .turning off everythings ........rether go with motorola razer v3.
I still don't see the point of using task managers and killing tasks. I just let the OS manage everything for me.
My Hero run very well indeed since I worked out that Peep was a real battery and resource hog.
I've just been for a 4 mile walk and used My Tracks to track the walk, Twidroid, Browser hot linked from tweets in Twidroid, answered a phone call and responded to a number of texts.
Looked at My Tracks a number of times to see what it was doing and to look at the satellite map. I like to point out things on the phone screen to the kids that they can see in real life - geeky but they think its cool.
Kept checking on how fast we were walking etc...
So screen was active quite a bit.
All over the space of 1hr 15mins with the GPS running all the time.
Hero never lagged once, battery used was around 10% (at a guess, maybe 12%).
Overall very impressed.
I'm not really using any huge widgets or a ton of home screens, but lately the system has been killing it. I have it set to be persistent in the app settings and in CM settings. Is there any way to monitor its memory use?
Sent from my HTC Glacier using XDA Premium App
Got it not to o long ago and having same prob, just thot it was unstable
It needs a lot of work. Although I've finally got things set up in such a way that ADW EX plays nicely with everything else, runs very fast, and never crashes on me. The only remaining problem is that it occassionally gets dumped from memory, even though I've got it set up to "Keep home in memory." So I have to watch it reload when returning to the home screen one out of every ten times. Other than that, it's beast.
Ive been using it for a couple months thru most of the nightlies upto rc2 and for me I was always able to fix every problem by switching to ADW stock and just giving up on the EX I't contantly froze up after more than 20 or so minutes in lock, no matter how long I gave it to setup after coming off lockscreen it would often still Fc or just freeze, there has seemed to be a lil less problems with rc2 though, most of the FCs I was getn could be avoided by not having any screen transition fx other than the stock scroll, this was killing me constantly, when I disabled it it almost ran smooth, almost! With the theme chooser now im so tempted to just toss it.
I think I found out what may have been causing it. I was also using Multitasking Pro, and I had it mapped to a double-click of the home button so the system thought it was my home app and kept it alive instad of ADW. Re-mapping MTP to the genius button and having ADW as my home key app fixed it. No crashes thus far.
Mine just recently started doing this and it was after i flashed RC2. I remembered this thread so I came over. It force closes constantly on a reboot until it seems to settle itself but I also get a force close on every phone call which blocks the caller id until i force close it. It's getting annoying but I love the design of my homescreen so i'm kind of torn. A fix permissions did nothing to rectify it. I guess i'll try to reinstall it and see what happens. Maybe Titanium Backup messed with it, I don't know.
Ive noticed this sinse ive bought the phone but i cant see why it lags so much on the simple task ie. when on the home screen it stutters when scrolling through the home panels ( i do have quite a bit of widgets but that shouldnt make a diffrence ) the browser on the other hand is fine? . One other thing ive noticed is that the camera takes quite a bit of time to take to picture and ready itself for a next one? the pictures still look amazing but my freind has a single core desire hd which has the same results instantly? Is there a fix to this in a rom or such im currently running a stock rom which has had the mods so that it doesnt lag?
Possibly bloatware? Try going into the privacy & security settings and do a factory wipe + usb wipe as well. If you bought the phone from carrier, this should hopefully remove all the carrier bloatware apps. If they are still there, then that means the bloatware is built into the ROM and you can't get rid of it without rooting and a custom ROM.
anyway there is absolutely no reason why the phone should be sluggish at the home screen. The stock touchwiz is already the smoothest stock launcher out there imo
Sent from my non-Apple device via XDA App
dav08094194 said:
Ive noticed this sinse ive bought the phone but i cant see why it lags so much on the simple task ie. when on the home screen it stutters when scrolling through the home panels ( i do have quite a bit of widgets but that shouldnt make a diffrence ) the browser on the other hand is fine? . One other thing ive noticed is that the camera takes quite a bit of time to take to picture and ready itself for a next one? the pictures still look amazing but my freind has a single core desire hd which has the same results instantly? Is there a fix to this in a rom or such im currently running a stock rom which has had the mods so that it doesnt lag?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
The lag most prob is to do with having lots of Widgets remove them and see if it makes it better.
Not noticed a delay with the camera app tbh might be to do with the focus options, you could mess about with the see if it speeds it up.
Yeah having too many widgets might be one factor, personally ive no lag whatsoever.
how do you have your phone set up so i can use the same rom as you etc.?
Bro we hav same prob but mine even worse..item age:1week(without root),1widgets, was downloaded 15 application from Android Market(Antivirus Free,Quadrant Standard,Fruit Ninja,Battery Indicator..etc).RAM status frequently maximum 355MB in use after clear 248-258MB. Setting Power Saving Mode. Rate with Quadrant Standard 3107point. The Main problem are 1)DELAY-(when open application such as clock, calendar, calculator,downloads,message inbox... average delaying 3-4sec), 2)LAGGING-(sometimes open gallery delay up-to 18sec, Playing Third Blade with delay performance, sometimes no response), 3)FORCE CLOSE-(When open new tab with Internet Browser, No Response while Playing certain Market Games-Task Manager status took-off all processing speed.Half Playing of Fruit Ninja, no response, auto jump to main menu...Somehow no solution to fix it....
Hi OP i have the same problem with the camera lag as well....recently ive notice a distinctly longer waiting period for the photo to save before the next shot is ready. anyway i thought it was my imagination until i compared it with my friend's S2 - which was lightning fast when processed.
If anyone have ideas on how to rectify the issue that would be really great!
sammy0A01 said:
Bro we hav same prob but mine even worse..item age:1week(without root),1widgets, was downloaded 15 application from Android Market(Antivirus Free,Quadrant Standard,Fruit Ninja,Battery Indicator..etc).RAM status frequently maximum 355MB in use after clear 248-258MB. Setting Power Saving Mode. Rate with Quadrant Standard 3107point. The Main problem are 1)DELAY-(when open application such as clock, calendar, calculator,downloads,message inbox... average delaying 3-4sec), 2)LAGGING-(sometimes open gallery delay up-to 18sec, Playing Third Blade with delay performance, sometimes no response), 3)FORCE CLOSE-(When open new tab with Internet Browser, No Response while Playing certain Market Games-Task Manager status took-off all processing speed.Half Playing of Fruit Ninja, no response, auto jump to main menu...Somehow no solution to fix it....
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You have power saving mode activated? Then turn it off!
Sent from my GT-I9100 using Tapatalk
hi man
i had this weird thing with my sgs2 it was laging alot
but the proplem was with the clock widgets when i removed them the phone was smooth !
just try that it might work with like it did on mine
This is my constant issue with android. Stock, this device comes with 7 home screen pages. So, out of the box I set up 10 widgets and a bunch of icons on each page. Upon doing so, a few days in, I started to experience some serious home screen lag; icons loading slowly, transitions stuttering, etc. So I slowly started to clear up the pages. Now, I am down to 3 pages with widgets/icons on them. Only now is the home screen responsive and lag-free. So, my question is... if you are able to take advantage of all 7, how do you do so without creating lag? And if its just not possible, why do these OEM's build the OS with so many home screen pages when the device will just tank after using 50% of them?
I never used all 7. I have three as well. Its a resource hog to have a bunch of widgets IMO
Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I717 using XDA App
I think it's more of a personal thing as well as a common sense thing. Just like on a computer, you CAN have 100 different applications open and running at once but it's going to slow your machine down to a crippling halt. Alternatively, you can keep a few open at a time. It's the big difference between Android and iPhone really - Android is more capable/powerful but it requires more user management whereas iPhone can be really limiting but doesn't really make you think about anything.
Samsung is probably making that many screens available to accommodate people coming from an iPhone who aren't used to an app drawer. They don't anticipate you're going to try to run widgets on every screen but instead think you're trying to just put all your app icons on the home screens.
I feel the same as far as the android/iphone comparison. Android is by far more capable, but also by far easier to screw up. My beef with that is that, unlike a computer... when your system starts running slowly, you cant just open up taskmgr and see "ohh xxx.exe is hogging ram and using 75% cpu". All the task managers for android seem pretty much useless to me. Every one I have used reports different memory usage amounts, and forget cpu usage... not even remotely accurate.
Hey guys, I stupidly updated my S4 to Lollipop and I've been having some pretty annoying problems.
-When I attempt to use the "Close All" button in the Task Manager(long home press):
-If running Nova Launcher - it freezes and goes to a black screen. Pressing home brings me back to the launcher and seems to fix it. I've also had it bring me back to TouchWiz, even though that isn't my default launcher.
-If running TouchWiz - Works fine.
-With both launchers, after clearing everything in the Task Manager list (manually, since close all barely works) and without opening anything else, if I reopen the Task Manager, there is always some random app running. Which is extremely confusing, since I just closed everything and nothing should be running.
I've also been having some other problems, such as my battery dying almost 5x faster than KitKat and my Mobile Data turning itself off randomly during the day. The switch in the notification panel shows that its on, and it even shows the correct amount of 4G bars, but if I try running an app that needs internet, it tells me that I don't have a connection. This is pretty annoying, mainly because there is no way for me to tell if it is working or not.
I have tried factory resets and clearing the system caches from recovery, neither worked. Really not sure what else to try, anyone have a solution? Really wished I stuck with KitKat, hopefully there will be a way to root sometime soon.
I noted the same conceren, close all will not return to Nova Launcher. Not a big deal to me.
The workaround I use is by removing each app individually by swiping or hitting the X in the right top of the displayed app.
Battery life has been good for me. I use Tasker to turn W-Fi/Data ON/OFF based on location and Screen ON/OFF.
That's what I have been doing but I was hoping that there was a solution. When everything is closed, does Task Manager also create random processes for you?
I shouldn't have to enable/disable data just to get the phone to keep a charge, especially since KitKat was so much better with battery. I left wifi/data one all the time and I still got better battery life than I do now.
Maybe Try this?!?
If you would like to try and go back to KitKat?!?!
TESTING Revert to KitKat on SCH-I545
That would be great, if I have the time I will try it. Has it been successful for anyone else but you?