[mr_e]

My battery life vastly improved with the use of a task killer. Even after conditioning the battery for a week and even with 4g, wifi, gps, data off, a lot of battery life was drained during the idle periods overnight. The addition of a task killer has meant that my batter went down only a few percentage points rather than running dry.

This is not just idle threads but clearly CPU consumption that is causing the drain. While Android enjoys great collective development, users of the apps are at the mercy of the developers to write the programs efficiently. There are probably a lot of apps that offer great functionality but are maybe not engineered with system resources in mind.

Certainly in some cases I have uninstalled an application or found an alternative, but it's nice to have the option.

There are simply too many variables at play to simply write off a task killer as unnecessary.