EVO battery drain? Your root caused it.

…or so some are saying. I did notice that I was indeed getting all the errors others were complaining about, and I had indeed rooted my EVO before getting the 2.2 update. My boyfriend did not root his EVO, and his phone is working fine after the 2.2 update.

Now I will say this, however, for all those smug commenters on various web sites blaming us ‘rooters’ for being *so* irresponsible to do such a  ‘drastic’ thing and we deserve what we get, here is my response: Go back to playing with your iPhone. Just because we give ourselves and are applications deeper access to our system, the worst thing we will have to face (provided we are indeed capable and know what apps can be trusted and which cannot) is to re-set the device. No big deal, we power users can do that, and we’re pretty much at peace with that possiblilty. And I have no problems “admitting” the obvious, as if that’s such a tough thing to do… that HTC released an update that did not factor in the end users who rooted their phones. But that has nothing to do with the EVO being shipped with these issues BEFORE a user ever rooted their device. 

I had not yet rooted my EVO when I first bought it on opening weekend, and when I downloaded Advanced Task Manager, I was able to see non-essential and, quite frankly, worthless (to me) apps like Nascar and SprintTV and AmazonMP3 Store, and about 6 other apps, all running and spawning at will, sometimes without provocation and at other times when I would merely check a text message, or scroll to a second home screen, or perhaps just look at the phone. This was also happening on my boyfriend’s EVO, and it certainly drained our batteries within a few hours. Advanced Task Killer helped this tremendously, and we both were able to get a pretty decent battery life out of the EVO albeit still much shorter than advertised.  Er go, the EVO, or HTC, or Sprint, has some explaining to do regardless, root or no root.

But I’m not so dependent on my root just as of yet so I am about to reset my phone (after I backup my 400+ contacts) to the factory settings soon after this post, then accept the 2.2 update. I will publish the results in this post under ***UPDATE***:

***UPDATE***.  Friday, Aug. 6th, 2010 5:49am EST.

So apparently the factory reset…..isn’t. But close enough I suppose. It erased every bit of data in my contact lists, etc. but mainained the 2.2 kernel. So I suppose I cannot get it back to 2.1 if I wanted. Then again, I might have to play with the boot menu and the 2.1 image may still be in there somewhere.

Nonetheless, upon a brand spanking new fresh install of 2.2, no less than 20 apps were running. Here’s a picture of my EVO’s screen looking at the running apps through the Advanced Task Killer app. It took two pictures to capture both pages of them:

My apologies for the dark pictures, but you get the idea I’m sure. If you’re being specific, that’s FM Radio app partially hidden at the bottom of the 2nd pic and the Voicemail app at the top.

Now, can anyone explain why a fresh Froyo install should have 20 applications running, none of which I launched or used and most of which I will never use? keep in mind this list doesn’t include the services that are running even deeper. Furthermore, killing those apps doesn’t stop them from working. For example, I can kill Gmail and still get email and notifications of new email.

Task Killer is the only thing that saves my battery right now. I have it set to kill everything when the screen turns off, and then I have the screen set to turn off after 3 minutes of no use.  I hope I don’t have to convince anyone that this is unnacceptable. Do I?

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.