[gator352]

Yeah it's a possibilty the update screwed us! Go figure right? But since everything IS tied to the SD card, removing the files from it breaks the link to whatever app is accessing it. When you put those files back on the SD card, the links between apps and SD card are not present till that particular app is used again. Then and only then does it reestablish the link. So it will give you better battery life cause most apps haven't reestablished the link to stay active causing battery drain.

In the case of the music widget, when you load up a song and listen to it from the actual music app in "all apps" then exit when finished, that song is still active in the widget so you can listen to music while doing other things. That widget maintains connection to that song on the SD card....all the time....using precious battery life. If you go into settings/applications/running services, the media app is running. Stop it. Then go back to the widget. The widget will be clear and it will say "tap to go back to music player". Sometimes it will stay clear (not polling for music), and other times it will automatically (within 5 seconds) poll, find, and display music without tapping. Meaning it started by itself and continues running as if you had never stopped it. It doesn't happen every time, but enough to make it a pain. Just browsing by the page with the widget can reactivate it. "Talk" is another big culprit. Even though you tell it to not load on startup, it does. So I ax'd it into oblivion.

My point though to formatting is this: When you format, all your doing is telling it how to allocate the unit size and what file structure to use. File structure is either FAT, FAT16, FAT32, or NTFS and each has a specific unit size you can allocate. When setting this and hit format, it erases all data to make this happen. FAT32 (which is more efficient than the others except NTFS but FAT32 is used primarily for winXP) uses 4096Kb by default all the way upto 8192 for each blocks unit size. NTFS uses 8192 by default. All this does is make the files stored on the media more efficient when called up to display. Example: a video that's 3.5MB in size will fit on one block formatted to use FAT32 @ 4096Kb. So if your media gets fragged, that files stays together for faster call up time. If the video is 4.5MB in size, it will take up 2 blocks....4.1MB in first block and 0.4MB in the second but the rest of block 2 can be filled with other data from another application. If your media gets fragged, that second block can be thrown elswhere on the disk causing fragmentation and making it slower to access that video. That's why we "Defrag"...to keep it all together.

So formatting that SD card (a clean SD card at that) does nothing in retrospect cause Android doesn't use FAT or NTFS as a file structure making it a moot point. All it did was break the links to apps that were accessing it resulting in better battery life. I was getting 10 to 12 hours from the EVO till I got rid of the music widget. Then I was getting 13 to 14 hours. Now I get 14 to 16 (with moderate use) but I also disabled a whole bunch of crap apps that were constantly running. Up time is always going to be different per user as we all have different ways we use our phones.