Comments on: On the Future of Computer http://wnstn.com/2010/01/28/on-the-future-of-computer/ Wed, 26 May 2010 11:55:28 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 By: Andrew Duthie http://wnstn.com/2010/01/28/on-the-future-of-computer/comment-page-1/#comment-155 Andrew Duthie Thu, 28 Jan 2010 20:42:11 +0000 http://wnstn.com/?p=785#comment-155 So as I was saying, it's not true that you can't kill applications running on an Android device. The capability to stop them is built-in, but clunky, so a few apps have been written to make it easier. I use Advanced Task Killer, when the phone feels too sluggish -- happens maybe once a week. (My iPhone was getting that way about once a day after 10 months. Rebooting would usually resolve it, but that takes a while.) There's a good article on why task killers are unnecessary on Android: http://geekfor.me/faq/you-shouldnt-be-using-a-task-killer-with-android/ The gist is that Android handles all this crap automatically, so let it do its thing. That said, there are apps that run in the background, such as Twitter clients, that every once in a while I want to shut off, to preserve battery power. I could open them and tell them to stop checking for new tweets, but just killing the app is a lot faster, and it preserves my settings for the next time I open the Twitter client. On non-Android matters: The thing I really love about e-Ink-based book readers is the elegance of the display technology. Right, you can't read them in the dark, just a book. And just like a book, if you're just looking at it, no power is consumed by the display. The iPad claims 10 hours of battery life, which is perhaps long enough that it doesn't matter how much power it consumes while you're just looking at the page. I do agree that with the Kindle DX costing the same as a bottom-end iPad, the DX price looks pretty bad. I suspect it will come down in response. So as I was saying, it’s not true that you can’t kill applications running on an Android device. The capability to stop them is built-in, but clunky, so a few apps have been written to make it easier. I use Advanced Task Killer, when the phone feels too sluggish — happens maybe once a week. (My iPhone was getting that way about once a day after 10 months. Rebooting would usually resolve it, but that takes a while.)

There’s a good article on why task killers are unnecessary on Android:
http://geekfor.me/faq/you-shouldnt-be-using-a-task-killer-with-android/
The gist is that Android handles all this crap automatically, so let it do its thing.

That said, there are apps that run in the background, such as Twitter clients, that every once in a while I want to shut off, to preserve battery power. I could open them and tell them to stop checking for new tweets, but just killing the app is a lot faster, and it preserves my settings for the next time I open the Twitter client.

On non-Android matters:

The thing I really love about e-Ink-based book readers is the elegance of the display technology. Right, you can’t read them in the dark, just a book. And just like a book, if you’re just looking at it, no power is consumed by the display. The iPad claims 10 hours of battery life, which is perhaps long enough that it doesn’t matter how much power it consumes while you’re just looking at the page.

I do agree that with the Kindle DX costing the same as a bottom-end iPad, the DX price looks pretty bad. I suspect it will come down in response.

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