Very useful battery saving Android apps

The biggest problem I had with my Nexus One smartphone is battery life. It took me a while to figure out how to extend it. So now with the help of three apps I am able to use the phone for a day and have about 50% battery left. Usually the battery just dies within a day.

1. Advanced Task Cleaner 2.0 which allows me to add apps to auto kill list. It is a useful feature because multi-task drains battery. Automatically killing apps running in the background you don' t need saves battery.

2. Advanced Task Killer which allows me to kills apps instantly. It's like task manager in wnidows.

3. JuiceDefender. This app almost doubles the battery life. It disables 3G and other services while the phone is in sleep.

I think I'll get Iphone 4 in 2 months when it becomes readily available. Now I just need to decide whether to get a ipad or not :).

Some updates

There has been a lot of changes in my life. I don't really know where to start. So basically I studied 3 years Engineering in lovely Belgium. After getting my Bachelor and Master's degree I returned to Shanghai as a software engineer. After 3 years in Shanghai, I decided to get a MBA in the U.S. After 2 years MBA school, I finally got my MBA degree last Sunday.

When I look back, it all start to make a little bit more sense now. Just like Steve Jobs said in his famous Stanford Commencement speech: "you can only connect the dots when you look backwards".

So much for my student life. On the technology front, I recently started using a macbook pro. After many years struggling with the PC, I have decided to make the switch. It surprises me that Mac has became a very versatile platform both for daily internet use and development. I've been using the macbook pro for over a week now. Didn't miss my Dell laptops a bit.

I don't have my windows 7 setup on the Parallels Desktop yet. So occasionally I would go back to my old laptop for school email, play music at the background stuff. Now it's summer, my dell xps laptop gets very hot. In case you didn't know, I had the hard drive, mother board, lcd screen and heat sink replaced in the less than 2 years time I owned the xps m1330 laptop. Dell's 3 year extended warranty is good. But it's a poorly engineered laptop. Latitude line seems much better. But it wasn't available at the time through my business school's purchasing program.

Another surprisingly pleasant benefit on mac is that it's super simple to setup Android, iPhone and PHP development environment. I used Ubuntu on my dell Inspiron 510m before and had a lot of problem with the upgrades since I don't upgrade regularly. So I had to revert to Debian on the Inspiron. However, Debian requires a lot of time to take care of the hardware drivers and setting up the system. So long story short, I've setup an Android, iPhone and PHP development environment on my MacBook Pro in less than 2 days. I can also do my day to day internet stuff. MacBook Pro has acted as a versatile platform. The best computer experience I ever had so far. Don't see myself going back to PC anytime soon.

Since I have the Nexus One, I am trying to see if I can develop some simple app for fun. Let me know if you're an android developer as well. We can share some learning experience and bounce ideas off.