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Background Tasking and Battery

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Twitterific's author, Craig Hockenberry, notes that enabling background tasks for an iPhone version of Twitterific resulted in battery drainage in 4 hours.

The heart of the problem are the radios. Both the EDGE and Wi-Fi transceivers have significant power requirements. Whenever that hardware is on, your battery life is going to suck. My 5 minute refresh kept the hardware on and used up a lot of precious power.

This information provides some perspective on Apple's decision to limit background applications from running on the iPhone.

[ via Tuaw ]

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