New to Droid have questions about OS running things in background

[unix1adm]

HI All, I am new to the Droid OS and just got my Motorola from Verzion.
Its interesting. I am coming from a palm 700W phone so there is a bit of a learning curve here.


A few questions I have is as follows:


1. My Droid seems to be running things in the background even after I use the task killer that I downloaded. They kill but then they come back or different ones come back. I dont know why they are launching or how to stop them. This i am sure takes memory and battery life.


2. Is the GPS suppose to talk to you or just show you directions on the screen? I thought it was suppose to talk to you. (speak directions)


3. Is there any good apps that I can use that will not go up to the internet and allow me to secure data like passwd and account info. i dont want to keep them in my contact in a Notes area as this gets backed up to Google automatically. I want something that is encrypted in case the phone is lost stolen etc.


4. Some times the screen wont rotate or take a long time to rotate. is this normal?


5. Has anyone gotten a ssh client to work on it? I want to ssh to a linux system to check things etc but not sure what to use. I was trying connectbot but it wont connect.

I am sure I have more question but this is my starting point.

Thank you in advance.

CJ

[unix1adm]

Some of the apps that keep restarting are com.goole.android.apps.maps:FriendService
bluetooth share (i am not using bluetooth)
calendar
corporate calendar
messaging
camera
settings
my uploads

[extorian]

1 - Applications and services that are needed to run (either because you've told them to, or because they're needed by other things) will automatically restart.

The FriendService is Google Latitude, so if you've activated that, then that's why it keeps restarting. It needs to access the internet every few minutes to update your location so your friends can see it.

Calendar is part of the core operating system. It's leveraged by a number of services. It will also reappear due to automatic synching, which is probably why you're seeing it reappear. You will need to turn off calendar syncing in the Data and Sync settings.

Corporate Calendar... never heard of it - this sounds like Android 2.0's exchange calendar service. I imagine the same applies - it's re-loading every time it automatically syncs with your exchange server.

Messaging... it needs to run to read SMS messages. As it also runs automatically whenever any SIM updates are sent to you silently via SMS messages (like they've done since GSM phones first appeared), this is why you're seeing it running.

Camera - don't know... are you pressing the camera button?

Settings... have you pressed Menu -> Settings, or gone into any system settings from other apps?

My Uploads - don't know.

Remember Android is different to most other phone operating systems. It's closer to Linux than any other type of operating system. Lots of services and applications constantly run in the background just like they do on Windows. However, and this is important, they do not have to use up a ton of resources. A service or app can be loaded, yet use almost no additional memory, and 0% CPU until it actually has to do something.

In general, killing off stuff is a waste of time. Android automatically asks apps to close that aren't needed when it needs more memory. Killing off some of the processes you are killing off also means it'll slow your phone down, as these processes only need to reload, and when you do need to use them it means the phone will be slower for the few seconds it takes to reload them.

Example: If you have the camera app loaded already, you can press the camera button and take a picture pretty quickly. If you have killed it then it will need to reload it, which adds about 5 to 10 seconds to that process.

2 - I heard rumours that voice guidance was coming with Android 2.0. I'm not sure if this is true or not. Or if it's just certain phones. My guess would be that currently it doesn't. If it does, you will also need to have installed the TTS (Text To Speech) data. I think that's somewhere in the main phone settings too.

3 - I've not looked, but I'm sure I've read something about this in Android 2.0 too. Is there not some kind of password wallet somewhere?

4 - Yes, that's normal. It depends on how much stuff it has to redraw. Rotating a webpage, for example, requires the entire webpage to be re-rendered. If it's just your desktop, then every icon and widget needs to be rotated.

5 - Yes - I've used ConnectBot absolutely fine. I'd check you're on the right network (i.e. using WiFi and connecting to a local intranet IP, or using GPRS/3G/etc and connecting to an internet IP, make sure the box isn't firewalled to external connections, etc).

[pgm8705]

2 - I heard rumours that voice guidance was coming with Android 2.0. I'm not sure if this is true or not. Or if it's just certain phones. My guess would be that currently it doesn't. If it does, you will also need to have installed the TTS (Text To Speech) data. I think that's somewhere in the main phone settings too.

Android 2.0 has turn by turn voice guided navigation. To use it, either start from the "car home" application, or from google maps, click on "navigate" after it gives you directions. You won't have to install anything additional.

[extorian]

When you first use the TTS service for the first time, it asks you to download the speech data to the SD card. At least, it did with me on 1.6 the first time I used the new "realistic" sounding voices.

[unix1adm]

How do I stop the following I dont use exchange and I dont want my calendare to sync to the internet just now.

"Calendar is part of the core operating system. It's leveraged by a number of services. It will also reappear due to automatic synching, which is probably why you're seeing it reappear. You will need to turn off calendar syncing in the Data and Sync settings.

Corporate Calendar... never heard of it - this sounds like Android 2.0's exchange calendar service. I imagine the same applies - it's re-loading every time it automatically syncs with your exchange server."

"4 - Yes, that's normal. It depends on how much stuff it has to redraw. Rotating a webpage, for example, requires the entire webpage to be re-rendered. If it's just your desktop, then every icon and widget needs to be rotated."

Some times it wont rotate at all. So I wonder if I have a defective phone....

Also I noticed the privacy screen protector makes it very hard to use the screen. take many pushes to make anything happen. .. Im going to take that off.

"3 - I've not looked, but I'm sure I've read something about this in Android 2.0 too. Is there not some kind of password wallet somewhere?"

Nothing that comes with it but I did download oi safe. Seems to work nice.

[extorian]

You can just turn off Calendar synching then in Menu -> Settings -> Data synchronization -> uncheck Calendar.

You can't stop the Calendar service itself running though, as it always runs in the background so that it can do stuff like notify you of events if you've set them.

[BobLoblawww]

For me, corporate calendar keeps restarting (which i don't use since i dont have Exchange, I only use the regular calendar), as do the alarm clock, google voice, and a couple of other things occasionally.

its pretty annoying and i don't know how to fix it, ive been through the settings on each of these and i can't figure out how to get them to stop relaunching after i kill them

[extorian]

But just because you don't use them doesn't mean your phone doesn't use them. Take the alarm clock as an example. It's methods are called by just about anything needing to start at a specific time. The exchange server stuff is probably launched as part of a synchronization process, along with GMail, contacts, calendar, etc.

These processes will use zero resources if they aren't being used. They only execute code when they are requested to or need to - so if you don't use them yourself then this won't be much. They will be garbage collected and unloaded from memory as and when Android needs to do that - so why worry? It's not Windows - processes work very differently on Android, as it's intent driven, not CPU shared time driven.

[au_dog]

Applications starting and running uninitiated is not particularly benign.

Problem number one are for those who don't pay for unlimited data plans. For example having the browser on say the "financial.google.com" page results in web-page updates say every n-seconds to a minute, continuously eating at the data-xfer.

Why would someone not have a data-plan? Wifi is sufficient for some folks. Thus being unable to control the apps, means one must manage the connections a bit more aggressively.

Furthermore, unconfigured applications running, makes little sense. Thus the corp-calander clicking off without being configured is just bad app design.

My larger concern is the foundation for virus/s has just been layed. The inability to control what runs = future virus environment.

I dislike this OS feature greatly. The inability to uninstall unused apps. The inability to stop apps from running [at all] is disconcerting.