Android will tell you exactly what's eating the battery under battery management. If texting is killing the battery, that's a sh!tload of texting!

Like I said saturday I sent about 40 text, received as many, plus email, plus shooting about 1/2 hour of video, plus shooting pictures, plus 10-12 phone calls, plus.... and my battery was no where near dead when I got home late that night. My old phone would have been dead at noon. The X battery should easily last as long as the iphone4 under similar usage, if not a bit longer since it's talk and standby ratings are a little higher.

Of course, with the X it's pretty simple to keep a 2nd battery handy and switch if need be.

The original Droid had fairly decent battery life too.

Sounds great! I’ll pass on your encouraging words. The X is no Evo for sure (in a good way). She just has to learn what saps battery and what doesn’t—she’ll figure it out. (And she’s still looking for a reliable AIM app—no luck so far. I recommended Meebo but it’s not working on her phone.)

A second battery is easy to carry for iPhone too But there’s a downside. With an Android you can drop the dead battery in a homeless person’s paper cup or feed it to your dog and forget about it, whereas with the iPhone, the original battery is stuck inside and you have to keep lugging it PLUS the attached backup battery.

Anyway, if I couldn’t get an iPhone, I’d be having fun with some Droid for sure!

Also, if she didn't condition the battery properly when she got the phone (i.e. full charge plus one hour before using it), when the battery runs down to say 40%, tell her to turn off the phone, take out the battery for a few seconds, then put it back in. This should reset the battery and the phone will start up with the battery meter at around 90% and last much longer.

Tip saved! Thanks.

If you double click the home button, bringing up the apps that are running (or in standby mode or whatever), put your finger on one and hold it down. They will jiggle with the x on them, as if you were deleting them.

This will "kill" them but not delete them. If that makes sense.

I'm not sure where you heard that, but double pumping the home button is not a list of recent apps, it IS the multi-tasking. Hold your finger on an icon for a few seconds and you'll notice a red quit badge appear over each icon. This allows you to quit the apps. Swipe to the right to see a continued list of more apps.

Actually, it IS a list of recent apps. It’s really not the multitasking, even though Apple hasn’t made that very clear (for obscure marketing reasons or simply failure to explain). It’s simply recent apps (and a new method for Force Quit, although Force Quit is a very rarely-needed function).

Multitasking and the recents-list are two separate functions that can be used independently of each other; neither depends on the other. For example:

* The app switcher works for apps that are not iOS-ready and do not multitask. They won’t switch as fast (they must re-load) but they behave the same in the app switcher. You’ll see your app switcher grow to dozens of recent apps—but they’re not all multitasking, they’re just a list of what you used in recent order. Some may be multitasking, some not, and you can’t tell the difference until you launch one and see whether it’s instant.

* Multitasking works without the app switcher: just hit Home like you’re used to, and you can switch to any running app. It will pop up instantly. You have full multitasking even if you don’t know the double-click recents-list exists.

* Force Quit is rarely needed, and people don’t need to be in the habit of doing it, but the app switcher gives a new graphical Force Quit method: the minus button. (Which replaces the old hold-two-buttons method.) This too is useful whether the app in question is multitasking or not. It’s how you’d kill a frozen app even if that app isn’t multitasking ready. (And there’s really no other reason to kill an app, except as an alternate method to stop music or voice guidance—but apps have more obvious ways to do that.)

* The minus button isn’t just to quit an app: most of the dozens of items in your recents-list aren’t multitasking and can’t be quit anyway. But they can still be removed from the list. (You’d rarely bother, but it’s not dependent on multitasking.)

* The recents list also tacks on playback controls for background music—a separate function that only relates to multitasking—but those controls did exist even before multitasking: as a popup. (It’s just that only iPod could actually use them.)

So the recents-list works even if you use nothing but old apps that don’t multitask (although Safari and Mail are always multitasking as they have been from the start). And multitasking works even if you never use the recents-list.

The app switcher is not the same as multitasking, but it IS a really nice tool! Much quicker to launch another app from there than by going to the home screen and flipping through page after page.

Yes, since it is Apple, it makes a ton of sense. Thanks for the info. I was liking the double click and jumping to another app but there were too many down there. Now I can kill all the ones I was just checking out.

Remember, though, there is no need to kill unwanted apps:

* Most of them have ALREADY been killed by the system. Only the most recent few are really multitasking. (How many? Depends on how much RAM they use. And some of them may not be multitasking even when they’re in the very first slots, because they haven’t been updated to support it.)

* RAM will not run out: the system will kill the oldest app for you when RAM is tight. You’ll never notice.

* CPU and battery are not used AT ALL by a multitasking app. It’s not 1990’s-style power-sucking “brute force” multitasking. The app is paused, “killed temporarily,” and its state preserved but dormant in RAM. It can be revived instantly, or will be automatically quit if the RAM is ever needed for the app you’re actually using.

* The exception is when you WANT the app to be doing something in the background: downloading a file, playing a song, giving you voice navigation. But these are things you started for because you wanted them, you know they are happening, and you can simply pause/stop them in the app if you change your mind. Killing the app isn’t needed.

In the case of TomTom, if that’s the app of concern, look for a diagonal arrow in your phone’s status bar. It will show when TomTom (or any app) is awake and using the GPS. If you don’t see that arrow, then TomTom is dormant, the GPS is powered down, and there’s no need to kill it from the list. (In fact, doing so means you can’t use the recents-list convenience to get back to it without the Home screen.)

My iPhone 4 has dozens of apps in the app-switcher. They have no affect on battery life—only what YOU are doing burns battery.

I understand I am mostly just removing clutter if I delete them that way. But I think the TomTom is still eating battery if I still have a route active. Once I reach home It takes a few clicks to "clear route" which I usually do not do. So with the combo of a 3GS iPhone, OS, 4.0 and TomTom not quite getting the update right I will likely kill it completely by deleting from the multitask bottom row.

TomTom just upgraded so their App would function with OS4.0. It is the only app I have used that would crash, and frequently (OS4.0 and older app.). The upgrade may have been rushed.Other than that I love their software. Well, that is until I went to buy a kayak yesterday afternoon and the GPS wanted me to drive across a field and into the woods. The place was in the boonies and some roads were never put in. I told the guy I had tried to use GPS to get to his house and he laughed, "no, that doesn't work around these parts."