That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that in my daily usage pattern push reduces my battery life by about 70%. Many of my friends and colleagues with iPhones experience similar results. IMO there's enough evidence to say that Push is likely to take a significant amount off battery life whatever the conditions. As ever of course, your mileage may vary.
Even Apple's guidance on iPhone battery life lists Push Notifications and Push Mail as #2 and #4 on their list of things to disable to increase battery life.
Anecdotal evidence is never a good guide line. My experience with Push enabled is nowhere near a 70% drop in battery life, but still a drop. Whether it is 10% or 90% with just Push mail and Push Notifications running, how much worse would it be with 2, 3 or 15 additional apps running. Even if they only ran as listeners, this still means additional thread running or sleeping. If just two, Mail and Notifications, is causing such a drop, adding more will only multiple this effect.
Anecdotal evidence is never a good guide line. My experience with Push enabled is nowhere near a 70% drop in battery life, but still a drop. Whether it is 10% or 90% with just Push mail and Push Notifications running, how much worse would it be with 2, 3 or 15 additional apps running. Even if they only ran as listeners, this still means additional thread running or sleeping. If just two, Mail and Notifications, is causing such a drop, adding more will only multiple this effect.
Agree here. It really shouldn't be controversial. Push notification should use less power than having background applications.
Mind that the iPhone has background applications. A lot of them. Just not 3rd party ones. If you want to do some testing, get some of the memory utilities (or force quite them yourself), and start doing some testing under controlled circumstances.
Like in the other threads, push notifications and multitasking are complementary, not mutually exclusive. All smartphones have or will have both eventually. Multitasking under the current processor and battery life constraints don't scale to more than 4 or 5 applications but allows one to do things more conveniently. Push on the other hand only solves some of the timer and communication related type applications, but it will scale to lots and lots of app. Tens, hundreds even.
Eventually, maybe in iPhone OS X 4.0, Apple will implement 3rd party multitasking. Whether for usability reasons, technical reasons ((limited processor and battery life), business reasons (can't give the customer every feature under the sun in one shot), or programmatic reasons (don't have enough people design/code in every feature) have prevented iPhone OS from having it, probably all of the above, it will eventually be available.
The UI for multitasking I think is overblown. Apple's already has all the tools and techniques available to implement a good UI for multitasking. They've implemented 4-finger swipes to enable expose and to switch applications in Mac OS X. The same can be done with iPhone OS X through 3-finger swipes (up-down for expose, right-left for switching among active apps). They can also turn on virtual memory/page files when CPUs and flash storage get fast enough, which just maybe be the next-gen hardware, even the current gen iPhone 3GS hardware is doable.
This doesn't mean push goes away. It scales and it save battery life. All the messaging type apps will continue to use it, especially since it can scale to 10, 20, 50 apps.
Even if they only ran as listeners, this still means additional thread running or sleeping. If just two, Mail and Notifications, is causing such a drop, adding more will only multiple this effect.
The battery hit from push mail and notifications is not the extra process/thread resources, but the network usage. The battery hit from background apps that aren't using the the network is negligible. The benefit of having such apps running in background instead of just maintaining their state between launches (as good iPhone apps do) is really just saving you time in switching between apps.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Shrike
Like in the other threads, push notifications and multitasking are complementary, not mutually exclusive
Totally agree .
Quote:
Originally Posted by Shrike
Eventually, maybe in iPhone OS X 4.0, Apple will implement 3rd party multitasking. Whether for usability reasons, technical reasons ((limited processor and battery life), business reasons (can't give the customer every feature under the sun in one shot), or programmatic reasons (don't have enough people design/code in every feature) have prevented iPhone OS from having it, probably all of the above, it will eventually be available.
Yep! That's what I said (more or less) in my original post!
The battery hit from push mail and notifications is not the extra process/thread resources, but the network usage. The battery hit from background apps that aren't using the the network is negligible. The benefit of having such apps running in background instead of just maintaining their state between launches (as good iPhone apps do) is really just saving you time in switching between apps.
Yeah, but it doesn't scale. While the background app may not be using the radio or processor cycles, it is still using memory. For the iPhone 3G and prior, it only had 128 MB memory. Apple's first party software took up 80 MB of that in a virgin state and basically all of it after using say Safari for a little bit. If you allow 3rd party multitasking, the VM system has to be turned on so that stopped background apps can be written to storage. That takes CPU cycles, some amount of memory, and will slow down the UI and will reduce battery. The VM system will hit battery life pretty bad. And your argument can be solved - not elegantly, but the capability fulfilled - by have apps save state and restarting quickly. Multitasking's real benefit is from have a background continuing to do work. That's where it really hurts not to have it.
Or, if you don't want a VM system, you will have the rather unsavory UI message of telling the user to close some applications (which one, who knows), and in which case, the user is simply juggling which apps they want to keep open. Apple's decided they know better in this case, and the UI penalty isn't worth it.
So, basic business practice. Who do you target? The masses that really don't care, don't use, or don't understand multitasking, but does understand that a product isn't friendly to use or is annoying to use, or the niche techno-versed folks? Eyes on the prize. The masses come first. Then fill out the niches. And Apple has been doing that very well with both the iPod and the iPhone.
Comments
That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that in my daily usage pattern push reduces my battery life by about 70%. Many of my friends and colleagues with iPhones experience similar results. IMO there's enough evidence to say that Push is likely to take a significant amount off battery life whatever the conditions. As ever of course, your mileage may vary.
Even Apple's guidance on iPhone battery life lists Push Notifications and Push Mail as #2 and #4 on their list of things to disable to increase battery life.
Anecdotal evidence is never a good guide line. My experience with Push enabled is nowhere near a 70% drop in battery life, but still a drop. Whether it is 10% or 90% with just Push mail and Push Notifications running, how much worse would it be with 2, 3 or 15 additional apps running. Even if they only ran as listeners, this still means additional thread running or sleeping. If just two, Mail and Notifications, is causing such a drop, adding more will only multiple this effect.
Anecdotal evidence is never a good guide line. My experience with Push enabled is nowhere near a 70% drop in battery life, but still a drop. Whether it is 10% or 90% with just Push mail and Push Notifications running, how much worse would it be with 2, 3 or 15 additional apps running. Even if they only ran as listeners, this still means additional thread running or sleeping. If just two, Mail and Notifications, is causing such a drop, adding more will only multiple this effect.
Agree here. It really shouldn't be controversial. Push notification should use less power than having background applications.
Mind that the iPhone has background applications. A lot of them. Just not 3rd party ones. If you want to do some testing, get some of the memory utilities (or force quite them yourself), and start doing some testing under controlled circumstances.
Like in the other threads, push notifications and multitasking are complementary, not mutually exclusive. All smartphones have or will have both eventually. Multitasking under the current processor and battery life constraints don't scale to more than 4 or 5 applications but allows one to do things more conveniently. Push on the other hand only solves some of the timer and communication related type applications, but it will scale to lots and lots of app. Tens, hundreds even.
Eventually, maybe in iPhone OS X 4.0, Apple will implement 3rd party multitasking. Whether for usability reasons, technical reasons ((limited processor and battery life), business reasons (can't give the customer every feature under the sun in one shot), or programmatic reasons (don't have enough people design/code in every feature) have prevented iPhone OS from having it, probably all of the above, it will eventually be available.
The UI for multitasking I think is overblown. Apple's already has all the tools and techniques available to implement a good UI for multitasking. They've implemented 4-finger swipes to enable expose and to switch applications in Mac OS X. The same can be done with iPhone OS X through 3-finger swipes (up-down for expose, right-left for switching among active apps). They can also turn on virtual memory/page files when CPUs and flash storage get fast enough, which just maybe be the next-gen hardware, even the current gen iPhone 3GS hardware is doable.
This doesn't mean push goes away. It scales and it save battery life. All the messaging type apps will continue to use it, especially since it can scale to 10, 20, 50 apps.
Even if they only ran as listeners, this still means additional thread running or sleeping. If just two, Mail and Notifications, is causing such a drop, adding more will only multiple this effect.
The battery hit from push mail and notifications is not the extra process/thread resources, but the network usage. The battery hit from background apps that aren't using the the network is negligible. The benefit of having such apps running in background instead of just maintaining their state between launches (as good iPhone apps do) is really just saving you time in switching between apps.
Like in the other threads, push notifications and multitasking are complementary, not mutually exclusive
Totally agree .
Eventually, maybe in iPhone OS X 4.0, Apple will implement 3rd party multitasking. Whether for usability reasons, technical reasons ((limited processor and battery life), business reasons (can't give the customer every feature under the sun in one shot), or programmatic reasons (don't have enough people design/code in every feature) have prevented iPhone OS from having it, probably all of the above, it will eventually be available.
Yep! That's what I said (more or less) in my original post!
The battery hit from push mail and notifications is not the extra process/thread resources, but the network usage. The battery hit from background apps that aren't using the the network is negligible. The benefit of having such apps running in background instead of just maintaining their state between launches (as good iPhone apps do) is really just saving you time in switching between apps.
Yeah, but it doesn't scale. While the background app may not be using the radio or processor cycles, it is still using memory. For the iPhone 3G and prior, it only had 128 MB memory. Apple's first party software took up 80 MB of that in a virgin state and basically all of it after using say Safari for a little bit. If you allow 3rd party multitasking, the VM system has to be turned on so that stopped background apps can be written to storage. That takes CPU cycles, some amount of memory, and will slow down the UI and will reduce battery. The VM system will hit battery life pretty bad. And your argument can be solved - not elegantly, but the capability fulfilled - by have apps save state and restarting quickly. Multitasking's real benefit is from have a background continuing to do work. That's where it really hurts not to have it.
Or, if you don't want a VM system, you will have the rather unsavory UI message of telling the user to close some applications (which one, who knows), and in which case, the user is simply juggling which apps they want to keep open. Apple's decided they know better in this case, and the UI penalty isn't worth it.
So, basic business practice. Who do you target? The masses that really don't care, don't use, or don't understand multitasking, but does understand that a product isn't friendly to use or is annoying to use, or the niche techno-versed folks? Eyes on the prize. The masses come first. Then fill out the niches. And Apple has been doing that very well with both the iPod and the iPhone.