Hey everyone... Recently I've been looking for an instant messenger that I can leave on and have the smallest impact on battery possible. I looked around online and couldn't find any definite information... so I tested it out myself.
I tested Agile messenger v84, fring v3.24.3.157, IM+ v4.58, Jive IM v0.9.1.0, Mundu v4.0231, Palringo v08.04.29 and Slick v0.42
I have a Cingular 8525 running Wm6.0. 3g is on, hsdpa is OFF, screen brightness 100%, battery charge 100%, on usb power. Push email is turned off and I have today agenda, gprs monitor, phonealarm and acbtaskman running.
I soft reset the device and logged in to yahoo, aim, msn and google and measured the data usage and averaged the mA drain sitting idle for 10 minutes without having the device go to sleep.
Here is what I got.
Baseline (no im):
test1 10minutes - 0.00 data, 92.9 avg mA, 25.7mb memory used
test1 chart - no chart sorry
Agile:
test1 10minute - 0.07mb data, 179.7 avg mA, 27.4mb memory used
test1 chart - http://geekmatrix.com/battery/Screen005.png
Fring:
test1 10minute - 0.03mb data, 105.95 avg mA, 28.5mb memory used
test2 10minute - 0.03mb data, 111.19 avg mA, 28.2mb memory used
test3 20minute - 0.12mb data, 106.35 avg mA, 28.7mb memory used
test1 chart - http://geekmatrix.com/battery/Screen006.png
test2 chart - http://geekmatrix.com/battery/Screen012.png
test3 chart - http://geekmatrix.com/battery/Screen015.png
IM+:
test1 10minute - 0.06mb data, 231.26 avg mA, 26.7mb memory used
test1 chart - http://geekmatrix.com/battery/Screen009.png
JiveIM:
test1 10minute - 0.01mb data, 122.63 avg mA, 30.1mb memory used
test2 20minute - 0.04mb data, 157.68 avg mA, 32.3mb memory used
test1 chart - http://geekmatrix.com/battery/Screen007.png
test2 chart - http://geekmatrix.com/battery/Screen014.png
Mundu:
test1 10minute - 0.18mb data, 277.31 avg mA, 32.1mb memory used
test1 chart - http://geekmatrix.com/battery/Screen011.png
Palringo:
test1 10minute - 0.02mb data, 146.16 avg mA, 25.3mb memory used
test2 20minute - 0.02mb data, 138.88 avg mA, 25.5mb memory used
test1 chart - http://geekmatrix.com/battery/Screen008.png
test2 chart - http://geekmatrix.com/battery/Screen013.png
Slick:
test1 10minute - 0.25mb data, 226.44 avg mA, 28.4mb memory used
test1 chart - http://geekmatrix.com/battery/Screen010.png
Conclusions:
Agile messenger - Agile used to be my favorite im client until it went commercial. I haven't used it since then. I always did like the features it offered, but I didn't find it worth the price they were asking per month. Now that I can quantify it's power usage... I find that it is right in the middle of the pack. Overall it would drain the battery less than IM+, Slick and Mundu, but it's still not low enough to leave on all the time.
Fring - what can I say? I was very surprised and impressed by this application. Very low additional drain on the battery. Connections available with twitter, skype, gizmo and any other sip based voip. Not too mention I can use my GrandCentral account with Gizmo to make free Voip phone calls to landlines and cell phones (very very cool!). I have decided that this is going to be my everyday chat program. There are certainly no bells and whistles... you can't set your status like you can with some of the other apps... you can't send files... there is no message history, but it allows you to keep it on all day with minimal impact to your battery performance. That works for me... and hopefully in the future they will make some of these essential additions (hopefully without changing the power consumption).
IM+ - This was an old staple for me for a long time. I used this chat client exclusively when Agile Messenger went to a pay per month model. I never really understood why it sucked my battery down so fast, which turned into the reason that I rarely logged in to chat from my phone. However... now I can visually see what was going on behind the scenes. IM+ likes battery power more than I do obviously... and has no issues with putting me in the inconvenient situation of needing to find a place to charge up. See ya later IM+ ... as a recognized leader in this particular sector of mobile software... you fail.
JiveIM - Jive is currently in beta and seems to be a very promising chat client. I still think it has a bit of a way to go as far as features are concerned, but it's got a good start and though it's not a battery sipper... it is far from the battery glutton that say Mundu is. I will keep my eye on this one as the providers are actively developing it.
Mundu - OMG! That's all I have to say to sum it up. In 10 minutes of sitting idel... this app managed to transfer 1351 packets. Sure some of those packets were used to check my gmail... and I'm sure it has some other nice features, but c'mon - 1351 packets?
I will admit I didn't look into it too much to find out what all the benefits were to Mundu, but ultimately I figured it wouldn't matter because there was no way I would use it. Just sitting idle this app is like being on a connected phone call. This is really a program that is greedy for juice... and given the opportunity, would suck a battery dry before you had a chance to chat with anyone. Mundu - You are the weakest link... goodbye.
Palringo - I think Palringo is great. It's decent on battery - not great, but if I were ranking these apps... Palringo would be 2nd for battery efficiency and 1st in features and usability. I figure I will keep this one installed and use both Palringo and Fring as my chat clients of choice.
Slick - Finally there is Slick. Made by Lonely Cat, the same ones to bring you ProfiMail, there was a lot to like right off the bat with it's simple clean design. Nice features like native file sending and typing notification... there was a lot to like about this program. But after about 30 minutes of using it... I realized while it's on my battery floats like a cannonball (ref. damien rice).
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I know this is not 100% definitive by any means, but it's a good place to start I think. I couldn't find any information so I figured I'd do some investigating myself. Hope it helps someone out there.
** Note... I was going to try Nimbuzz, but it wouldn't start. Also... OctroTalk was a possibility, but I didn't like how it uses transports for Yahoo, Aim and MSN... So I skipped it.
Post some comments... let me know what you think.
Thanks,
Mark
It's funny you mention "transports" for AIM and others. I assume you mean the messages go through a third party server before they are sent to the AIM server.
As far as I know, IM+ and the official AIM client are the only instant messenger programs for Pocket PC that connect directly to the AIM servers. For all the others, I could either not find information about whether they did, or they mentioned channeling the messages through their own servers.
In my opinion, direct connections, phone friendliness, and notifications are most important. IM+ excels in these areas, and I have not been able to find another client that comes close.
Jason_25 said:
It's funny you mention "transports" for AIM and others. I assume you mean the messages go through a third party server before they are sent to the AIM server.
As far as I know, IM+ and the official AIM client are the only instant messenger programs for Pocket PC that connect directly to the AIM servers. For all the others, I could either not find information about whether they did, or they mentioned channeling the messages through their own servers.
In my opinion, direct connections, phone friendliness, and notifications are most important. IM+ excels in these areas, and I have not been able to find another client that comes close.
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I understand what you are saying about direct connections. Im sure agile, jiveim, palringo and probably most are server based connections to the im accounts. However with OctroTalk I believe it is a Jabber transport which feels a little clunky and requires you to authorize people all over again.
As for the direct connection... I havent found that to be so important especially when you consider the amount of data and mA thrashing that it seems to do.
In either case I just figured a chat app that doesnt run the battery down is a program that I will actually use. Doesnt matter about direct connections and what not if you cant maintain a presence for an extended period time. At least that is my experience.
Fring seems to be the best option for me... but of course ymmv.
Mark
Fring FTW!
Did you try the hacked version of AIM 2.0? That's what I use and I would like to know how much battery it uses in comparison to these programs.
If you need the CAB i'll post it here
Sirgatory said:
Did you try the hacked version of AIM 2.0? That's what I use and I would like to know how much battery it uses in comparison to these programs.
If you need the CAB i'll post it here
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Sorry... I use all of the major im services so anything that is not a multi service messenger didn't make it on my list of programs to test. I suggest you test it yourself and you can compare them to these results, maybe that would help you?
nice review thanks for taking the time to do it i'm currenlty a im+ user been using them for about 2 years or so now
i've liked the program but i've been interested in checking out jiveim one of my friends uses it on his blackberry and raves about how good it is and from your power test it looks like jiveim uses less resources
i do like fringe though that looks like it will be a good prospect also i'll probably check that out too
i also have a grandcentral account and free calls sounds like a plus
First post although I've been lurking for a while trying to decide what I'm going to do. I'm currently with AT&T off contract so I'm free to move. I've looked at the Fuze in several AT&T stores and the overall impression is that it's very sluggish. I know that loading one of the cooked roms helps by removing the useless stuff they add but when I went to a Sprint store this morning, my impression was very good. The Sprint version was very snappy and quick to the point where I could launch a you tube video in a couple of minutes where at the AT&T store, I wasn't able to do it even after an hour. I learned last night I have to find the youtube viewer for the Fuze to work.
Here are my questions:
1. How big of an impact is the network speed for this perceived difference in speed? I live in SF Bay area which AT&T says is 3G enabled.
2. Would loading a trimmed down rom resolve these issues?
3. Does the cooked roms allow me to view flash video and youtube videos with reasonable speed and ease of use?
Please advise.. I'm trying to make a decision today.
Now, I've read a bit about tethering and people's concerns about the provider detecting it. I work in network security field and can say for a certainty that they can detect it. Whether they act on it or not is another matter. Google "OS fingerprinting" or "TCP fingerprinting". The short description of the technique is to look at the TCP handshake packets (mainly the SYN and SYN-ACK) to look for certain default values and features. Every OS has a slightly different set of default values when a new TCP connection is step up. This can be used to detect what os is doing the connection setup. A common tool that does this is nmap. There are ways to make your OS undetectable or harder to detect but what we need for the tethering case is for the tethered OS to look like WM6.1 stack. That can be much harder to do than simply hiding. I'll try to figure out what a WM6.1 stack looks like compared to vista or linux for instance.
Friends,
Since my first HTC phone I have, probably like the rest of you, either ticked off header compression and left software compression unchecked either because of something I googled or because some connection setup wizard made the decision for me. I've grown increasingly curious about this and bam here's a thread.
Presuming that any form of bandwidth compression would buy me more throughput, would that not come at the expense of additional CPU and battery to do the math? Would any additional throughput due to "software compresson" and or IP header compression be contigent on the type of data being transmitted (for example a thoroughly compressed file versus a big white BMP or the letter X a million times)? In addition to my own eccentric fascination with this, I do like to listen to Howard on SiriusWM5 and I'd like to know whether or not to check these boxes for the sake of my battery life and for the sake of being able to get the "CD quality" stream without it chopping up and buffering.
So I just did a little field testing on my Fuze running ROMeOS 1.70.3 (CE 21009) with radio 1.08.25.20, 100% signal in midtown Manhattan (near where that plane's taking a bath) at midnight EST with nothing but WMWifiRouter running for tethering with wifi power on full blast using multiple speedtest providers like dslreports.com/speedtest and speakeasy.net/speedtest both to NYC servers and to others across the country with no compression five times, header compression five times and header and software compression five times.
But the results are inconclusive. Without any compression I get an average of 1200Kbs/900Kbs, max 1339Kbs/1346Kbps. With both types of compression I got slightly slower download and slightly faster upload (1120Kbs/1427Kbs max). Probably not enough sample data not to chalk that discrepency up to an anonomly.
Back in my Kaiser days, I was able to break 2200Kbps without compression both on these speedtests and on very large tethered downloads. And now during the day I get substantially slower speeds than at night. So I'm thinking AT&T in my city is either over trafficked now versus six months ago and/or I am being throttled (though I am using the non-NAT elite isp.cingular WAP). So that suggests to me that for the purposes of providing any useful data regarding whether some kind of compression makes any difference for all of us, my wings are clipped.
But I'm still curious. Anybody know a thing or two about this?
If not, but you all share my curiosity and want to get to the bottom of this, I would be happy to set up a series of 10MB (or much larger) files on my mirror, some super compressed, some not at all, whatever, for you to experiment with as these short "speedtest" sites may burst just the right amount and type of data through for your carrier to give you deceptive results. Also with files that size on a fast mirror you can more accurately guage, if you have the right software, comparative battery drain and if there is a difference, does it add up, byte for mAh, to be the same deal either way.
Doug
the other day i was racing with my brother in downloading on a 3.5g network .i was using spv c600 while he using sony ericsson w810.both our phones have an edge connection.the most weird thing was that i always lost. when uc browser i was getting a speed of 5kb/s while he was getting 17-30kb/s.when using opera i still lose.ive upgraded to windows mobile 6.5.so, my question is,HOW IS THIS POSSIBLE?i thought windows mobile is more powerful than java based phones.is there a registry or anything to maximise internet cause this is rily strange.
Have you used the very same network? Swap SIM Cards (and setup) and repeat. There are many factors that define data throughput...
we have even tried it on 2 other networks but his is still faster
How did you measure speed? Is there a special website for measurement or did you just compare user interface (website loaded)?
we just the same files from various websites and started downloading at the same time but his downloads always finished faster than mine. i cant use websites since pocket ie is very slow in rendering pages. the funny is that when using my phone as an internet sharing device on the pc but instead download with the phone my speed increases upto 25 to 30 kb/s
For the little internet stuff I do with this device I find that Opera mini is perfect. If you want real page rendering (and still the option for "Turbo" - at least a little) then use Opera 10 for Smartphone. Googlemail has also a nice Java application - there you are on the same level anyway.
i just found out the problem .when i use the java version the speed is 5kb/s when i use the windows mobile version speed reaches upto 40kb/s .thanks for the help
Michaelbukachi said:
i just found out the problem .when i use the java version the speed is 5kb/s when i use the windows mobile version speed reaches upto 40kb/s .thanks for the help
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use UCWEB for best browsing, as reverensi read carefully and you can download it at http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=503744&highlight=UCWEB
hopefully you get the best
The browsing experience depends on many options - especially on low performance devices like the Tornado:
Transport speed and data volume (from source to browser - in non-proxy mode)
CPU capacity to render the received data
Proxy performance including transport speed from origin to the proxy and from proxy to the browser.
Opera Proxy in Norway (I suspect). Not sure about UCWeb and a Proxy option.
Non-Proxy use eats a lot of data from your account (if no flatrate), takes time to load to the device and time to render the page onboard. I am not sure how the page-source servers are reacting to the exposed HTTP client string - so it may be different to proxy mode again.
So just try it out with your favourite pages and with/without proxy use. In Opera the proxy mode is called "Opera Turbo" - not sure for UCWEB, as said.
My favourite is Opera Mini (WM Generic version, not the Java version - it only has the "Turbo Mode") - it loads fast and so do the pages.
UCweb and Opera Mini has a server. So its like you are using proxy. This proxy allows to minimize the content so that it will not cost a lot.
Btw check your 3g, there is many 3g speeds
Hello everyone, I am a new networking and sys admin grad so would love to know if my thinking is incorrect or I am missing anything.
I am cursed with no high speed access where I live rurally so...I use work/coffee shops to do some downloading on my S10.
I use Tor and AirVPN, forced UDP protocol 443.
I have checked multiple times and cannot find DNS or WebRTC leaks with Air (happy with their service overall)
With a popular port for traffic, checking these leaks, and using Tor/VPN (with killswitch on) my question is:
How secure is my activity? Essentially...since I have no access at home I download shows and movies with the Flud client.
On top of a torrent client would it also be secure to grab it from MEGA/Tezfiles? I see maybe a higher WebRTC risk but am I correct in thinking for what activities I am doing I am pretty much safe? Since activity is piracy and not like dark web or anything for them to truly deep dive.
Thanks for the feedback!!