Database Users

[Q] What's the best option for push Hotmail without killing the battery?

Coming from a BlackBerry I want my Gmail & Hotmail to push to me instantly. Gmail works as expected, but for Hotmail rather than setup a POP3 account to automatically check mail every so many minutes, thus draining the battery, I decided to set up another Gmail account and let it pull my Hotmail for me:
(Can't post links, Google "Android Central Using Gmail Your Own Personal Push Mail Server")
This should do Gmail push for my Hotmail thus saving battery but more often than not I am NOT notified of new Hotmail unless I push the refresh button, putting me right back at square one with no push and battery drain by refreshing all of the time.
So the question - is Gmail checking Hotmail my best bet or should I try ActiveSync? My understanding is Android's implementation of ActiveSync is a major battery hog being that it is always connected to provide said push services, so I've stayed away from it however my current setup doesn't seem to be terribly optimized. Any suggestions? Thanks!

Hotmail does push now through activesync.
Google it. I cannot post urls.

Right, my question is how is the Hotmail/ActiveSync push performance and more importantly how does it affect battery life? My understanding is its pretty bad, was hoping someone here has tried it and can tell there experience with it.

i cannot really confirm it... but since enabling hotmail push for me personally... i cant even make it past 1 day with a full charge.... even a full charge plus a half at work for the remainder of the day barely gets me to 9pm
like i said... i havent confirmed this by turning it off, but quite simply... im blown away by how bad my battery life has become on my galaxy s

SEVEN is a great email app that I'm using that pushes all 4 of my Yahoo, 1 Hotmail, 1 Gmail and 1 AOHell to my phone. It's far better than the stock email app, and I've never tried Moxier Mail that was installed on my Moment before I got the Epic.

ss4rob- the epic does not like people who eat sushi. It will drain your battery when it detects raw fish

exchange [corporate] email sync = useless phone?

hi everyone,
ive been using a slew of custom roms since our lovely heroes got rooted snd on everyone I setup my work email and calendar along w/ my gmail. When using sense roms it didnt seem to be a problem, same battery life/responsiveness with or without it.
I'm now using CM6, flashing the dailies actually. and after one flash my phone was extremely laggy and the power control widget wasnt working so i wiped, and it was running flawless, fantastic battery life to boot, best i ever had.
I then decided to resetup my exchange email, and boom the phone is garbage. laggy beyond normal use and watching the battery percentage drop from 94 to 89 in the matter of minutes, i chalked it up to it resycning the emails, so i waited it out about an hour, battery life was 67%...so that pinpointed my culprit...
even after setting all my accounts not to sync [i didnt see an option to pinpoint 1], i get the same responsiveness from my phone. It's only after removing it from my accounts and sync section the phone returns to normal.
ps i've only set the calendar (not contacts) to sync, and 3 days of email syncing every hour (longest delay, the sense roms let you pick longer or manual)
anyone have any thoughts? and please dont say use touchdown, i tried it and its not for me. thanks for reading.

Exchange Sync on mine drains the battery to, if its set to PUSH email, if you set it at an interval - even 10 minutes its not so bad. I have mine set to 1 hour and 1 day (About 100 emails a day), so it checks it 6-7 times through the work day, and then I can manually refresh when I am at home. I wish I could set a schedule on it - I don't need the exchange email between 8-5 because the people who email me are 30 feet away and they usually just yell after they send the email. After 5 if it switched to push on its own, it would be awesome.
That being said, the phone is still completely usable with exchange setup, just a battery whore.
EDIT:
I have noticed that even though it is set to an interval, if you are in the email app, or open it it seems to force a sync regardless of settings. I wonder if it does this in the background. I have never paid close enough attention to see.

thanks for the reply, good to know im not the only one whose corporate email sync is a battery hog.
in the mean time i've actually found a bit of a workaround i figure i share for anyone else in my situation. since i barely checked my email but used the calendar alot. I downloaded Google Calendar Sync software on my work pc and set it up to do a 1 way sync and put my Outlook calendar on my google calendar, which syncs with my phone obviously.
So far so good, but i hope the exchange sync issues dont go unnoticed within the CM6 dev team.

Changing gmail fetch rate?

On the Gmail app on the Vibrant, is there any way to set when your phone checks for mail? I'd like to be able to lower the rate at which it checks. Can't seem to find any option for it whatsoever.

As far as I know, there is no polling interval. New e-mails are pushed directly to your phone the moment they arrive.

vapotrini said:
On the Gmail app on the Vibrant, is there any way to set when your phone checks for mail? I'd like to be able to lower the rate at which it checks. Can't seem to find any option for it whatsoever.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
If you want to do this, you need to turn off email sync, with gmail , and set gmail up with the regular email app on the phone, gmail gets push mail notifictations, the regular app polls at a set time.

Thanks for the responses.
thegreatcity said:
As far as I know, there is no polling interval. New e-mails are pushed directly to your phone the moment they arrive.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Well if that's true then surely that is hurting battery life, no?

A further question:
Will Gmail still update if you turn off Auto Sync? What about Background Data?

if you turn off auto sync, then nothing will come to the phone that is on that account, email, contacts, calendar, etc. its either all on or all off

vapotrini said:
Well if that's true then surely that is hurting battery life, no?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Not necessarily. You may want to look into other options to conserve battery life, but if you feel that Gmail is the culprit, Id say that watcher has the appropriate solution. The regular email app, is decidedly less feature filled, but you can certainly change the polling interval with it.
Kubernetes said:
Will Gmail still update if you turn off Auto Sync? What about Background Data?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
No, with Auto-sync off, you only get calls and texts.

Push is not Poll
vapotrini said:
Well if that's true then surely that is hurting battery life, no?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I don't believe that is necessarily true. Gmail leaves a TCP/IP connection open to a server, but transmits no data unless there is a new message. In other words, think of your phone as running a very simple and secure server that is ready and listening for Google to connect to it and alert it that there is a new message to retrieve (I don't think it's really a server, but it helps conceptually). Leaving that port open and a constant connection with no data flowing requires no additional battery life over what is necessary for your cellular modem to be on (which you need to be able to receive calls as well).
Wikipedia says that the technology used is Microsoft ActiveSync, but I'm inclined to believe it's XMPP (which is what Google Talk uses and is built into Android for other uses as well). But the above description of the technology is valid either way.
(spamblocker, remove the spaces) http :// en.wikipedia. org /wiki/ Push_e-mail # Google_Android
Every time a message is received, battery life is consumed in order to download the message. So, if you were to get the message on your desktop first, handle it, and delete it, I presume that would save you the battery life of the download of that message, but that is a very nominal amount of battery life. I wouldn't worry about it.

watcher64 said:
If you want to do this, you need to turn off email sync, with gmail , and set gmail up with the regular email app on the phone, gmail gets push mail notifictations, the regular app polls at a set time.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Just a heads up to the OP (or anyone interested) regarding the stock email application- my experience was that the polling interval was unreliable. I have 3 email accounts, 2 of them were set to check on frequent intervals like 10 minutes or something and the third was set up to check on the hour.
Often times the stock email app would miss the intervals or would not check at all. Additionally there were numerous occasions that mail was sitting on my server but the stock vibrant mail would report no messages.
Your mileage may vary as many people seem to have very different experiences with their phones and bugs. My experience with the stock email app was pretty poor so I thought it worth sharing.
GPS and such annoyed me but I figured I'd be able to wait it out for a fix. Email was nearly a deal breaker though, especially having these problems after coming from blackberrys which do a great job with email.
I figured gmail was the way to go but i didnt want to get into some complex forwading scheme fr all of my email addresses.
The way I ended up working it out was to set up a free Google business account and change the mx records on my mail server to run through Google servers instead of my webhosts servers. Now I'm running all of my email addresses on the Gmail application and have push email and aside from a few minor gripes with the gmail/android interface I am pretty happy overall.
I'd suggest sticking with the gmail application, push email is a good thing.

Juice Defender from the market allows for setting how often your phone connects to a data connection. More or less doing the same thing.
I don't personally use it since I don't care, but it should answer the OP's question with a working solution.

Thanks for all the responses guys, a lot of good alternatives out there it seems.
I don't get all that many emails a day so was just curious if disabling it would save a lot of battery life. Since the general consensus is that it doesn't I'll leave it be.

[Q] Exchange Support in 2.2, etc.

Has anyone with a Windows Live Account tried hooking thier phone up to Hotmail via ActiveSync to see if they get HTML Email?
This is getting incredibly frustrating. I'm wondering if it comes through in the 2.2 Email Client.
I tried TouchDown for a bit earlier and it gets the Hotmail HTML Mail, but the user interface is terribad and it doesn't seem to Sync stuff until you tell it, even with Push enabled. The Options are a complete and utter mess. The widgets leave much to be desired.
Can anyone comment on TouchDown's battery drain on this phone (I run stock JI6), btw?
There's another Exchange Client on the Market but I'm not paying $25 just to check and see if it works correctly.
Anyways. Can anyone comment on the Exchange support in JK6 (or whatever the new leacked ROM is) or this TouchDown question (battery drain).

Touchdown doesn't drain battery anymore than any other properly coded client does. As long as you're using push, drain will be minimal. I've used touchdown since it came out almost 2 years ago - definitely more efficient (if not as pretty) than the others in the market in my opinion.
Sent from my SGH-T959 using XDA App

Eh... I've been thinking hard about buying it. I do like the upcoming events Widget it has.
They need to implement swyping to go between screens (Mail, Contacts, Calendar, Tasks) and organize their options.
Also their big widget seems to have much higher touch sensitivity than anything else on my phone
It has performance issues and the develper recommended a lag fix in their Google group, which I find kind of emabrassing considering I have bigger apps on my phone who do not lag as much as this one.
I guess I'll use it for a few days and see if it grows on me... I really want to move all my stuff to hotmail. I can't stand Google Calendar/Contacts/Tasks (mail is fine ).

I could never get my corporate exchange account working until I tried anderdroid's aispish rom. Ever since I've been using that email.apk on other roms successfully.
Sent from my Nexus One using XDA App

The Sync works, there just aren't many clients other than WP7 and iPhone that properly display HTML emails from Hotmail due to the version of ActiveSync protocol Hotmail uses.
Edit: F it, I'll just move everything to Google and detatch my Hotmail account. Maybe that'll help with battery woes, as a side effect...

MAJOR battery drain from Mail app

Dear all
I've only had my SGSII a week or so but have been very unimpressed with the battery life I've been achieving - not even a full working day.
I've been trying to work out what's going on, but this morning things really seemed to come to a head. I'd charge overnight but within an hour and a half of disconnecting the phone almost half the charge had gone & the back of it felt very warm to touch.
Looking at the battery stats and using the Watchdog program it looks like the Samsung Email app is to blame. I also saw the phone was marked as 'awake' much of the time, presumably due to a partial wakelock from the Mail app (battery history in Gingerbread doesn't seem to actually have partial wakelock as a category but this certainly looks like it). I've got three accounts setup in it - 2x Microsoft Exchange and 1x IMAP. Refresh times were initially push (MSEx 1)/manual (MSEx 2)/15 min (IMAP). I've tried changing them all to 15 min or to manual but it doesn't seem to improve matters. In case it is of relevance, the MSEx ones are imposing device & storage encryption as part of their policies (I've no choice in this).
Relevant screenshots below - would be grateful for any thoughts as to how and improve matters!

What firmware are you on? I believe the later ones fix the email app slightly, although I haven't seen any drain as bad as yours.
Another option, if you don't mind flashing a custom ROM, would be to install VillainROM 1.4, and use the Villain Tweaks app to get the vanilla Android e-mail app. It's what I've done, and it seems to work well!

Thanks for the reply. I'm just on the stock ROM that came with the phone (XWKE7) - both update on the phone and Kies don't report any further update being available for me (UK SIM-free unbranded).
I tried rooting this morning and used TB to freeze some of the Samsung rubbish (hubs, etc.) - however none of this made any difference to battery usage.
I wasn't sure how the stock email app handled MS Exchange accounts that required encryption? The Samsung Mail app isn't that bad, I particularly liked the split pane view - it seems really badly coded though if it's causing this!
Short of a total ROM replacement any other thoughts from anyone?

delete the data from the app
settings/applikations/all/email/ delete or wipe user data (all data).
make a new Mailaccount.

spline1 said:
delete the data from the app
settings/applikations/all/email/ delete or wipe user data (all data).
make a new Mailaccount.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thanks - had been looking for this but couldn't find anything under 'Mail' - found it under 'Email' as you mention As soon as I deleted the data it recognised the device encryption policy had been removed and this triggered a decryption of system and external storage. I'll monitor battery usage for a few hours then reinstate the IMAP account and monitor things again before finally restoring the ActiveSync account.

OK definitely some progress so far - only IMAP account added just after charging stopped and battery usage has dramatically improved...
Now going to try adding an MS Exchange account!

OK, so far so good - MS Exchange account added back in and left on overnight...
I wonder if the mistake was when first setting up the account picking the special Samsung 'premium account' option??

OK - I'm now suspicious that it is manual sync setting that is causing the issue - re-added a second Exchange account and put it all to manual - phone almost totally drained in a couple of hours, with the sharp drop occuring just after I added that:
Have tried removing just that account and hope that will do the trick. If so, will then try adding it again but setting a sync time rather than leaving it on manual.

I've switched to touchdown for my corporate ms exchange account (push) instead of the samsung app.
Battery life gone from 7 hours to about 16 hours. I can't believe the native app is so thirsty. (KE7 stock)
Sent from my GT-I9100 using XDA App

What's interesting was that I was getting around 16+ hours too with the stock app having an MS Exchange account (on push peak times and 15 min other times) an IMAP on 15 min and a few Gmail accounts. It seemed to be adding the 2nd Exchange account on manual sync that sucked the battery life again. Am going to try readding it but paradoxically leaving it on a more frequent sync setting to see how that does.

If i remember correctly, it was observed that the mail app (non gmail) and wifi interact to cause a lovely wakelock, and that it happens with stock and samsung.
Maybe try something like k-9 mail?

Intersting - it certainly seems to behave like a wakelock. As I say though with one account on push and one in 15 min it was working fine - it was only when I tried to add a second exchange account on manual that I started to run into problems. Pretty poor coding on Samsung's part though regardless! Does anyone know the best way to raise these sort of issues with them?

Get in touch with Seven as well they produce the email app. I have mine on push with exchange and no bad battery drains, also I run manual when in the office once again no heavy drainage. I am on VR though.
Sent from my GT-I9100 using XDA App

alanjrobertson said:
Does anyone know the best way to raise these sort of issues with them?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
In USA, they just introduced this
http://www.facebook.com/SamsungMobileUSA?sk=app_158125230916392
but obviously I doubt we can use this for SGS2 that is not out in the US yet.
You can however say that you are traveling, in the States right now

Thanks for the suggestions, folks - will try them. The @SamsungUK twitter account never seems to reply to any Tweets, but will see if they have a comparable FB page. Have found Seven's website so will get in touch with them too.