Possible stupid question: battery life +plugins?

[Guest KenR7A]

....Silly question which I probably know the answer to:

Does running a customized home screen with clocks, meters, monitors, shortcut bars, etc etc, drain the battery faster?

This is my first smartphone and I am noticing that my battery power is draining quicker with these plugins loaded. (I used the windows default home screen before and it seemed much better.)

Here is the home screen I loaded:

http://www.modaco.com/index.php?act=dscrip...etails&f_id=122

[Guest w411y]

Shouldn't ought to

[Guest KenR7A]

Interesting, I guess I will test later using the "Windows Basic" home screen. Maybe I'm just imagining things. Its only been 1 week with this thing. :)

[Guest Jamma14]

Infact, plugins can severly impact battery life, depends on the phone and the plugin. If you use a homescreen with the smart monitor plugin and have it refreshing frequently for example, you battery life will be affected noticeably.

EDIT: And that's exactly what the one you pointed out does, you may want to weigh up battery life against homescreen functionality and decide if you want to keep it, or alternatively change the refresh="" attribute in the xml to something larger, like 300 or so (which is 5 mins, values are in seconds).

(By the looks of things, at the moment it is refreshing the values it displays every minute or so).

Edited December 7, 2005 by Jamma14

[Guest KenR7A]

Thanks, I checked it out and the "unselected" portion had no setting for refresh... (??? refreshes every second?!) and the selected portion had refresh="60".

I set both to 120. We will see how that goes!

[Guest alexgraham]

hey, just thought I'd add the reason for battery being drained quicker. Its because the processors inside smartphones/PPC's etc are efficent in the sense they only use power when being used, thus anything requiring more processing will mean more power needed from the battery. Yes i know i'm a geek

[Guest Jamma14]

Thanks, I checked it out and the "unselected" portion had no setting for refresh... (??? refreshes every second?!)  and the selected portion had refresh="60".

I set both to 120.  We will see how that goes!

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

No that means it will go to the default refresh setting, which is 60 secs.

HERE is some more documentation on the plugin if you want to customise it some more.

James

[Guest KenR7A]

No that means it will go to the default refresh setting, which is 60 secs.

HERE is some more documentation on the plugin if you want to customise it some more.

James

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Thanks for that link. I did find that in my searches. I love the idea of these meters checking things out constantly, but theyre of no use when they never update! Two or three times has the battery and temp just sat there at the same value for hours. I ususally need to reboot or go to flight mode and back to get them to "refresh".

It happens, I think, when I remove the phone from the active sync connection. Whatever state the meters were in at that point, they will stay.

[Guest Tech]

YES IT WILL!! :)

it depends on how many things you have on the plugin... and what it requires to run it.

the more things you have... the more usage of the battery/processing power