Keep Your Droid Fast

I love my Samsung Moment, but I would be lying if I were to say that there have not been things that have caused me problems while owning it. One of the problems that I noticed after using the phone for a while was that it was losing some of the zippiness and responsiveness that I had gotten used to. I would attempt to open up my drawer of applications, and the drawer would slowly pull up from the bottom of the screen, seemingly mocking me with it's sluggishness. As you can probably guess, this drove me a little crazy, but, after doing a little searching around in the Android Market, I was able to find an app that solved this problem for me.

The issue was, you see, the use by some of developers of their ability to run applications in the background on the Android OS. The Android OS has true multi-tasking, and can run many programs at once, but, since each phone has a limited amount of processing power, many apps running automatically in the background can cause your phone to run slowly, and even eat away at the life of your battery.

You probably want to avoid this at all costs.

If you have version 2.1 of Android, then you have system tools that work fine for controlling your applications, but, if, like me, you are running 1.5 or 1.6, then you don't really have the tools necessary to control this aspect of your phone. Do not despair though, because there is a remedy!

The remedy can be found be going into the Android market and typing in TasKiller. There are two versions of Taskiller on the market, the free version that runs ads and has some reduced functionality, and the full version. But, in either of these versions, Taskiller is an application that lets you close out any applications that are running in the background that you may not want to run. All you will have to do is select the Taskiller from your list of applications, and it will bring up a list of all of your open applications. From there you can either pick the apps that you want to close manually, or you can choose to close all applications. Please be aware that closing all applications also closes the system applications that control your connections, and will clear out all of your notifications. The system should start your connections back up automatically, but it would probably be best if you checked your notifications before killing all applications. TasKiller full also comes with widgets that you can install on your home screens so that you can see how much memory you have left, what applications are running, and so that you can kill apps without opening TasKiller.

TasKiller is a good application that, properly used, can help to keep your system fast, and increase your enjoyment of your Android device. Check it out, and let me know what you think!