Tim
Task Killers again? Sort of. At the beginning of this month, Amazon offered up a task killer for free and we tried to do our best to educate some of our newer readers who may not have known, that these apps are basically useless now that phones are up to Android 2.2 and above.
Today though, Amazon returned with a similar app that isn’t exactly a task killer, but more of a task “manager” called Watchdog. First of all, it’s a $3.49 app that can be had for nothing, so you may want to grab it just for the sake of grabbing it. But second, we want to know if this app is something worth having on your phone?
When we tweeted our initial thoughts on it earlier, many of you were quick to point out that this app is actually different than your average run-of-the-mill task killer. In fact, a decent sized group of you made sure we knew that this app wasn’t that bad and can come in handy if you run into rogue or poorly coded apps that have run amuck on your device. Watchdog can tell you if something is using up too much CPU and then let you decide if it should be killed. So in essence, this is more of a CPU monitor than a task killer – and that’s not a bad thing since RAM is something we like to let Android handle.
So we’ve sort of changed our opinion on this app (a little), and will recommend that you at least give it a look. We’ll be giving it a good run-through over the next few days and will report back. But again, the app is normally $3.50 and if can help the efficiency of your device, why not try it out before it jumps back up in price?
And as always, please feel free to let us know your thoughts on Watchdog in the comments.
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