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Hey everyone... Recently I've been looking for an instant messenger that I can leave on and have the smallest impact on battery possible. I looked around online and couldn't find any definite information... so I tested it out myself.
I tested Agile messenger v84, fring v3.24.3.157, IM+ v4.58, Jive IM v0.9.1.0, Mundu v4.0231, Palringo v08.04.29 and Slick v0.42
I have a Cingular 8525 running Wm6.0. 3g is on, hsdpa is OFF, screen brightness 100%, battery charge 100%, on usb power. Push email is turned off and I have today agenda, gprs monitor, phonealarm and acbtaskman running.
I soft reset the device and logged in to yahoo, aim, msn and google and measured the data usage and averaged the mA drain sitting idle for 10 minutes without having the device go to sleep.
Here is what I got.
Baseline (no im):
test1 10minutes - 0.00 data, 92.9 avg mA, 25.7mb memory used
test1 chart - no chart sorry
Agile:
test1 10minute - 0.07mb data, 179.7 avg mA, 27.4mb memory used
test1 chart - http://geekmatrix.com/battery/Screen005.png
Fring:
test1 10minute - 0.03mb data, 105.95 avg mA, 28.5mb memory used
test2 10minute - 0.03mb data, 111.19 avg mA, 28.2mb memory used
test3 20minute - 0.12mb data, 106.35 avg mA, 28.7mb memory used
test1 chart - http://geekmatrix.com/battery/Screen006.png
test2 chart - http://geekmatrix.com/battery/Screen012.png
test3 chart - http://geekmatrix.com/battery/Screen015.png
IM+:
test1 10minute - 0.06mb data, 231.26 avg mA, 26.7mb memory used
test1 chart - http://geekmatrix.com/battery/Screen009.png
JiveIM:
test1 10minute - 0.01mb data, 122.63 avg mA, 30.1mb memory used
test2 20minute - 0.04mb data, 157.68 avg mA, 32.3mb memory used
test1 chart - http://geekmatrix.com/battery/Screen007.png
test2 chart - http://geekmatrix.com/battery/Screen014.png
Mundu:
test1 10minute - 0.18mb data, 277.31 avg mA, 32.1mb memory used
test1 chart - http://geekmatrix.com/battery/Screen011.png
Palringo:
test1 10minute - 0.02mb data, 146.16 avg mA, 25.3mb memory used
test2 20minute - 0.02mb data, 138.88 avg mA, 25.5mb memory used
test1 chart - http://geekmatrix.com/battery/Screen008.png
test2 chart - http://geekmatrix.com/battery/Screen013.png
Slick:
test1 10minute - 0.25mb data, 226.44 avg mA, 28.4mb memory used
test1 chart - http://geekmatrix.com/battery/Screen010.png
Conclusions:
Agile messenger - Agile used to be my favorite im client until it went commercial. I haven't used it since then. I always did like the features it offered, but I didn't find it worth the price they were asking per month. Now that I can quantify it's power usage... I find that it is right in the middle of the pack. Overall it would drain the battery less than IM+, Slick and Mundu, but it's still not low enough to leave on all the time.
Fring - what can I say? I was very surprised and impressed by this application. Very low additional drain on the battery. Connections available with twitter, skype, gizmo and any other sip based voip. Not too mention I can use my GrandCentral account with Gizmo to make free Voip phone calls to landlines and cell phones (very very cool!). I have decided that this is going to be my everyday chat program. There are certainly no bells and whistles... you can't set your status like you can with some of the other apps... you can't send files... there is no message history, but it allows you to keep it on all day with minimal impact to your battery performance. That works for me... and hopefully in the future they will make some of these essential additions (hopefully without changing the power consumption).
IM+ - This was an old staple for me for a long time. I used this chat client exclusively when Agile Messenger went to a pay per month model. I never really understood why it sucked my battery down so fast, which turned into the reason that I rarely logged in to chat from my phone. However... now I can visually see what was going on behind the scenes. IM+ likes battery power more than I do obviously... and has no issues with putting me in the inconvenient situation of needing to find a place to charge up. See ya later IM+ ... as a recognized leader in this particular sector of mobile software... you fail.
JiveIM - Jive is currently in beta and seems to be a very promising chat client. I still think it has a bit of a way to go as far as features are concerned, but it's got a good start and though it's not a battery sipper... it is far from the battery glutton that say Mundu is. I will keep my eye on this one as the providers are actively developing it.
Mundu - OMG! That's all I have to say to sum it up. In 10 minutes of sitting idel... this app managed to transfer 1351 packets. Sure some of those packets were used to check my gmail... and I'm sure it has some other nice features, but c'mon - 1351 packets?
I will admit I didn't look into it too much to find out what all the benefits were to Mundu, but ultimately I figured it wouldn't matter because there was no way I would use it. Just sitting idle this app is like being on a connected phone call. This is really a program that is greedy for juice... and given the opportunity, would suck a battery dry before you had a chance to chat with anyone. Mundu - You are the weakest link... goodbye.
Palringo - I think Palringo is great. It's decent on battery - not great, but if I were ranking these apps... Palringo would be 2nd for battery efficiency and 1st in features and usability. I figure I will keep this one installed and use both Palringo and Fring as my chat clients of choice.
Slick - Finally there is Slick. Made by Lonely Cat, the same ones to bring you ProfiMail, there was a lot to like right off the bat with it's simple clean design. Nice features like native file sending and typing notification... there was a lot to like about this program. But after about 30 minutes of using it... I realized while it's on my battery floats like a cannonball (ref. damien rice).
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I know this is not 100% definitive by any means, but it's a good place to start I think. I couldn't find any information so I figured I'd do some investigating myself. Hope it helps someone out there.
** Note... I was going to try Nimbuzz, but it wouldn't start. Also... OctroTalk was a possibility, but I didn't like how it uses transports for Yahoo, Aim and MSN... So I skipped it.
Post some comments... let me know what you think.
Thanks,
Mark
WOW
Excellent tests, Will definitely help someone in identifying which IM is better for the battery. Granted the best in battery life might not be the best in bells and whistles, but you can make the choice. There are other places where you can compare these bells and whistles.
Question though, did you have DirectPush enabled (that keeps long running sessions, so only 1 packet needs to be sent about every 5-8 minutes).
Also, did you notice any change in the numbers (data and battery) if the number of accounts change?
coolsva said:
WOW
Excellent tests, Will definitely help someone in identifying which IM is better for the battery. Granted the best in battery life might not be the best in bells and whistles, but you can make the choice. There are other places where you can compare these bells and whistles.
Question though, did you have DirectPush enabled (that keeps long running sessions, so only 1 packet needs to be sent about every 5-8 minutes).
Also, did you notice any change in the numbers (data and battery) if the number of accounts change?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
That was my hope, to help others. I know it helped me to look at it like this.
As for DirectPush... Originally I had it on, but I found that it skewed the results for finding out what the IM program was doing only. So I turned it off. I left 3g on because I wanted to see what it was like in real world conditions.
I only logged into the standard 4 accounts... Yahoo, Aim, msn and google. I considered only logging into one account, but that wasn't how I was going to be using the program and figure most people would use at least 2 accounts. I figued the best thing to do was to have them all log into the same accounts to get a good idea how they handle it. Whether logging into less accounts effects data and power levels... I cannot say.
Hey guys - Martin from Palringo here. Thanks for the awesome research caswell. You may be interested in a blog entry I've posted on the topic of Palringo and battery life:
http://blogs.palringo.com/martin/?p=474
We've really taken the issue seriously. One thing worth noting is that Palringo's current consumption will go down as it's used more. It actually adapts to the detected usage pattern and optimizes the power saving strategy accordingly.
We're also working on a new release which will have even more dramatic improvements in this area.
BTW, according to your stats the control memory usage is 25.7MB, which falls to 25.3 with Palringo running. We've certainly tried to write tight and efficient code, but I never knew we'd acheive NEGATIVE memory usage
Zone-MR said:
Hey guys - Martin from Palringo here. Thanks for the awesome research caswell. You may be interested in a blog entry I've posted on the topic of Palringo and battery life:
http://blogs.palringo.com/martin/?p=474
We've really taken the issue seriously. One thing worth noting is that Palringo's current consumption will go down as it's used more. It actually adapts to the detected usage pattern and optimizes the power saving strategy accordingly.
We're also working on a new release which will have even more dramatic improvements in this are.
BTW, according to your stats the control memory usage is 25.7MB, which falls to 25.3 with Palringo running. We've certainly tried to write tight and efficient code, but I never knew we'd acheive NEGATIVE memory usage
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I think Palringo is a great client... and would certainly welcome even better efficiency when it comes to power consumption. I was already impressed considering the extra features you bring to the table such as the picture and voice messages (ala Agile Messenger). Those are certainly handy.
Since I have you in a thread... maybe I can make a couple suggestions that would be very welcome:
1. Ability to set a custom message for status globally rather than individual status.
2. Facebook instant messaging I hear is on the horizon, would be nice to have that as well.
As for the memory usage... I have no idea how that happened... but it did. Obviously with only one result for a control group of data and only a couple trials for the test subject nothing can be definitive, but I find the generalities to be very telling.
Overall... great app and thanks for chiming in. I look forward to the next release. Palringo is already a keeper along with Fring on my device.
Mark
Thanks for the feedback. I'm pleased to day that both your suggestions are in the pipeline
Zone-MR said:
Thanks for the feedback. I'm pleased to day that both your suggestions are in the pipeline
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Sweet... Good to hear. If there is anyway I can help let me know.
Have a good weekend.
Hi there!
Just got my first "Hero only" phonebill after getting the device and I must say I'm pretty shocked. It was 3 times normal!
I have only used Facebook INTERMITTANTLY and not logged in under the "Social" function. Twitter has been off. I haven't used email yet. I have only used Android Market under wifi and my only real usage has been various news sites with iPhone adapted webpages.
The only thing I can tell that's "on" has been the weather.
So I installed 3G Watchdog to monitor the usage and this is what I found out:
- In a twelve hour window with
- No Browser usage, no Facebook/Twitter/Flickr/Market
- Setting for Google has been "Enable background data usage" but not Auto-sync
- No Exchange usage or email
- Enable always on mobile has been activated
- No other internet function is activated as I can tell
- This has resulted in 610kb if data usage, that's 1.2mb in 24hrs
- That's 36MB a month, 436mb a year (and I pay per mb)
To me, this is "data out the widow" which I havent used, but the Phone has somehow "eaten" up.
I feel as though I havent got much control over how and when the Hero used data, the settings are not "clear" in the Android/Hero settings on administrating data usage. In my instance, it uses data without me needing it.
Is there any way to monitor WHICH program or function uses data without need? Ie. something like 3G Watchdog but more detailed?
there is net-counter.. but its familiar to 3g watchdog..
Android phones, and phones like them (e.g.iPhone) are really not designed to be used with "pay per MB" plan. I couldn't tell you what processes are going to be "consuming" data, but I'd consider 1.2MB to be pretty insignificant, though I understand that if you're paying by the MB your opinion would be significantly different.
I know it's probably not much help, but if I were you, since you are not using any of the "push" facilities of the device (e.g. GMail) I'd be inclined to switch off mobile internet and only switch it on as you need it.
Regards,
Dave
foxmeister said:
Android phones, and phones like them (e.g.iPhone) are really not designed to be used with "pay per MB" plan. I couldn't tell you what processes are going to be "consuming" data, but I'd consider 1.2MB to be pretty insignificant, though I understand that if you're paying by the MB your opinion would be significantly different.
I know it's probably not much help, but if I were you, since you are not using any of the "push" facilities of the device (e.g. GMail) I'd be inclined to switch off mobile internet and only switch it on as you need it.
Regards,
Dave
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Good advise there for you. 1.2Mb is very little though in the big scheme of things. Its about a minute of a typical MP3 or less than the capacity of a floppy disk (if you remember those).
The phone is designed to be used with an unlimited data plan - its a cloud based phone really.
As an aside, I do think these plans are still too expensive in reality.
foxmeister said:
Android phones, and phones like them (e.g.iPhone) are really not designed to be used with "pay per MB" plan. I couldn't tell you what processes are going to be "consuming" data, but I'd consider 1.2MB to be pretty insignificant, though I understand that if you're paying by the MB your opinion would be significantly different.
I know it's probably not much help, but if I were you, since you are not using any of the "push" facilities of the device (e.g. GMail) I'd be inclined to switch off mobile internet and only switch it on as you need it.
Regards,
Dave
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I'm aware of this fact Dave, I had the Diamond before I got the Hero. But what I lack is a built in function to "control and monitior usage". As of right now, it seems like it lives it's own life. If you have an unlimited plan, you wont really care. But Another point is the fact that this "unwanted" data usage consumes battery power and thus limits the battery life.
All I want is to be in control of my phone....
I am considering an unlimited plan or a 1gb/2gb plan. But there is a "cap" on my current plan where I won't pay for data over 3MB every day, but it's still a lot when you use that much every day.
You could try something like Droidwall ( http://code.google.com/p/droidwall/ ), but this only works for rooted devices.
At least you should be able to "whitelist" the apps that you want to be able to talk to the outside world, and see if this has any material effect on your data usage.
Regards,
Dave
Perhaps something obvious, but have you turned off the 'always on mobile data'?
You can find that under the wireless controls, mobile network settings.
And with a lot stuff (like the weather applet) you can disable the automatic updates.
Also turn off some data sync stuff under settings, data synchronization.(Google services for example).
Hope this helps a bit, although you might have done this already
Droid wall might help otherwise as a previous post also says
I had the same problem as I don't have a plan and my carrier charges per mb , so I installed APNdroid (it changes the APN settings , and restores it if you want to use mobile network ) .
HTC even provide a widget to turn mobile data on and off quickly. Put it on your Home screen.
I used this while on vacation to avoid huge data costs.
Also set Google synchronisation to non automatic, sync it when you need too.
TBH though, the Hero is such a data centric device, its pretty boring with no live data connection... as are iPhone and any other smartphone.
RaptorRVL said:
Perhaps something obvious, but have you turned off the 'always on mobile data'?
You can find that under the wireless controls, mobile network settings.
And with a lot stuff (like the weather applet) you can disable the automatic updates.
Also turn off some data sync stuff under settings, data synchronization.(Google services for example).
Hope this helps a bit, although you might have done this already
Droid wall might help otherwise as a previous post also says
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
"Always on" should not use up data as it is only there to keep the connection open so the phone doesn't have to connect each time an application needs to use 2G/3G/3.5G
I disabled the always on, weather etc... but something is still consuming data. Must be one of the apps circumventing the phone settings.
But my point is this, it is to diffucult/complicated/cumbersome/unintuetive so control the amount of data the Hero uses.
Also make sure stocks is set not to update.
If you are really concerned then just turn mobile data off until you need to use it (via the widget).
The point of these type of phone is to connect to many different services. Its simple to turn all data off if you wish.
The expectation for the smartphone is that it will be dragging information in constantly, keeping you up to date with your social network.
However, you might try WiSyncPlus to automatically disable data access when you are not in range of known WiFi networks. That might be the easiest way of controlling your data consumption over the cell/mobile network.
SOLVED:
The new official Facebook App was to blame for almost the entire 1,2mb a day usage. I did not log out, just pressed the home button and the app was running in the background updating.
Is this a bug? Is there any need for it to update when you don't have it open? I'm thinking battery power here as well as data usage.
Sebastian768 said:
SOLVED:
The new official Facebook App was to blame for almost the entire 1,2mb a day usage. I did not log out, just pressed the home button and the app was running in the background updating.
Is this a bug? Is there any need for it to update when you don't have it open? I'm thinking battery power here as well as data usage.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
The "Home" button doesn't actually shut down the app , it merely puts it to sleep. The "Back" button on the other hand closes the app and removes it from memory.
Linux has it very own and famous scheduler which on its own manages sleeping apps and can discard them from memory at will when the need for more memory exists
In settings you have the option to set the refresh interval, you can change it to 0. Might also be worth using a task manager to kill unwanted programs.
Devs need to write their apps correctly TBH. If its in the background and the user has not set its background processes to keep working, then it should stay silent.
ONLY if a user elects to have background processes running should an app continue to work away.
A simple setting in an apps preferences is all thats needed.
The back button to kill apps... thats pretty silly TBH especially with Browser. You would have to hit back multiple times to return to the very first web page you opened before you actually exited the app... very cumbersome.
Again, a simple setting in each app and indeed globally in the Hero's settings would make life far less confusing.
I'm looking for a decent data usage app.
I can use Deezer without data coming out of my allowance, so I need an app that can exclude apps from its count.
I've tried the stock app, Onavo, and Data Usage, but none of them offer the facility I need.
The most aacurate I've used so far is 3G call meter. In most cases there are downlodable profiles for different carriers and plans. I don't like the widgets though. They're pretty basic. All other apps counted minutes ok, but most times data was way off.
My data manager hands down
Onavo here.
Do any of these apps have the ability to exclude certain apps from the date usage count?
Try watch dog
Sent from my SM-N900
great app
Has anybody noticed that my magazine and flip board use a lot of data? Well it's mostly the Flipboard app. I can read the news for maybe 20 minutes and goes through a few articles and it can rack up almost 50 megabytes of data whereas if I use my browser (Opera) I use maybe 10 megabytes of data for the same amount of reading. It looks great but not easy on the monthly data allowance.
Agreed - they are data and processor and battery hogs.
If you need your news updates I'd rather suggest MyBoard (added by Samsung to S5 in Germany, don't know about other markets) or very similar Taptu app - they work great with minimum data usage. If you configure them to open stuff with internal browser it'll be even lighter on the data usage.
Anyhow - in most cases the articles load without pictures - and I'm happy with that - and if you want to access those just tap on the bottom to open in browser (internal to the app or external - in your case and mine Opera).
Hope this helps
Thanks good to know I'm not the only one. I don't really need it that much but just pass time while I'm waiting for something. Looks like I will stick with my browser instead of using flipboard.
Is there any application to monitor the real-time network traffic? I have tried many applications like internet speed meter, float network monitor or some other network monitoring apps. But they all showing current upload/download speed and daily/monthly data usage. What I am looking for is since my internet bandwidth speed is limited and slow, I would like to know what applications is now downloading/uploading with the speed of ??KB/sec so that I can see it and close it down them running in background.
Thanks in advance.
I guess the title of the topic is kind of confusing. You can ask something like, data usage per app monitor or that type.
satslu said:
Is there any application to monitor the real-time network traffic? I have tried many applications like internet speed meter, float network monitor or some other network monitoring apps. But they all showing current upload/download speed and daily/monthly data usage. What I am looking for is since my internet bandwidth speed is limited and slow, I would like to know what applications is now downloading/uploading with the speed of ??KB/sec so that I can see it and close it down them running in background.
Thanks in advance.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Not exactly what you want but you may try this:
open Settings > Data usage. Here you can see a list of apps and their corresponding data usage.
You can also tap on each app and select "Restrict background data" to prevent it access to the Internet using mobile data connection.
vndnguyen said:
Not exactly what you want but you may try this:
open Settings > Data usage. Here you can see a list of apps and their corresponding data usage.
You can also tap on each app and select "Restrict background data" to prevent it access to the Internet using mobile data connection.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thanks for all ur answer. May be u all got me wrong. Let me explain a bit more.
Let's say if my internet speed is max at 64KB/sec. If I want to download the file with max speed or want to load youtube video with full speed, I dont want to let other applications running in background and taking certain porting of my network traffic and making everything jammed. If I can have such applications (DU meter, net meter)in windows, I can see what is currently running such as ( windows update, antivirus update), then i can stop them and let my desired application run at max speed. Even though my device is multitasking, i cant do multitasking in network due to network speed limitation.
I hope you all can understand my problem.
I don't think there is an app that limits its allocated bandwidth. I know it's not the same but, WifiKill is useful if you are dealing with other people using the wifi, but other than that I don't think an app that controls the bandwidth on a per-app basis exists.
I wish developers can do that in future.☺