The Android Lollipop promised a lot and delivered on many of its promises, but it failed hard when it came to one all-important feature – battery power. This remains one of the most wanted and sought after improvement by every user of a smart phone to date. The expectations of users from the Android Lollipop were sky high on this front when it was announced as an update. Unfortunately, their hopes have been belied with many complaining of faster battery drain when they use mobile data and not the Wi-Fi.
Issue is an old one
Some of the apps like the Chrome and the Google Now Launcher consume mobile data as well as battery. Strangely, they do not exhibit this when on Wi-Fi. Google has not been forthright in acknowledging this glitch and have not come out with any solution as yet. Users have been reporting battery drain issues for quite some time now and they were happy when Google fixed the problem of such drainage when on Wi-Fi.
Now that the Android M has been announced and a second preview has been released, there is renewed hope among users. They expect the management of memory and boost in battery power to be much better. The optimism stems from the tool related to memory management that is now showing under Settings. This tool will list out the apps and the memory they are consuming. It will also show the RAM being consumed even as these apps are in rest mode. Users will therefore be able to close down memory and battery guzzling apps to give a boost to their phone.
Memory leaks can affect battery power
The Lollipop suffers from memory leaks issues that are having a cascading effect on the memory as well as battery power. Essentially, when apps guzzle memory during usage, they also tend to hog memory space when not in use, unless there is an effective memory management device to control such behavior.
The Android M appears to have sorted out this anomaly and we hope that the feature does reflect in the ultimate release of this OS. There are other changes as well but they are likely to be dwarfed by this one huge benefit that users will be able to experience tangibly.
Just to mention them though, the app launcher scrolling vertically as opposed to the horizontal direction till now is another good change. Users have been giving feedback about the frustration of losing letters and Google has addressed that pretty well.
However, the Themes option that surfaced in Preview 1 has now been hidden for the moment in Preview 2. Users will hope it makes a return in the final release.
The excitement is slowly building up and is reminiscent of the hype during the launch of Lollipop. This time let us hope Android M is able to live up to it in full.
