[Epic 4G General] femmegeek:
Over the past day or so I've been playing with different things and finding out most of the bandwidth constipation (for lack of a better term) comes from continually updating DRM and Market content via the Download Manager (i.e. - Google Maps continuously updates, over and over again, and other things like Media Hub, which launch a "DownloadManager2" service I have suspicions of as well). I didn't notice it appear in my status bar until I manually did an "Update PRL", which reset my radio, and an "Update Profile" ("Update Firmware" and "Update Android" gave me no options) through the About Phone menu in Settings.

After watching Maps update completely a few times yesterday, I totally disabled "auto sync" and "background data" under Accounts & Sync in Settings last night, and all seemed quite peaceful until I noticed this morning I still had no G-mail sync/updates. Turns out, for G-mail sync (or any Google Services like Calendar, Contacts, Books, Blogger, etc.) to work, BOTH "auto sync" and "background data" must be enabled. Market minimally requires "background data" to be enabled to even access it via the app. I did notice that "Picasa Web Albums" was enabled under Google services sync, and wondered if it was trying to download gigs upon gigs of old photos to my phone, so I disabled it, though I haven't seen any Picasa albums show up in my Gallery index. (Don't know if that option appeared because I had the Google+ app once, but uninstalled same day after I was done playing with it.)

I also re-disabled Download Manager in services this morning, and it's not showing as running right now as of this afternoon, which is strange because I couldn't make it go away for very long yesterday.

So far this afternoon my phone has synced with G-mail three times upon instant arrival of messages.

I probably just need to download some type of network access app firewall to disable DRM and Market stuff with Download Manager, and a type of network monitor to really grasp what's going on and when with other apps, other than just trying to police it periodically all day.

(Yeah... I'm one of those people who can sit for hours and watch network monitors and downloads in real-time, even though I could just go read a log.)

Still no resolution for the USB/power issue but you're probably correct, in that I tend to "wear out" these cables as well. I find that most of the ends that connect to the phone tend to almost come loose and eventually apart over time. I had one data cable that worked for awhile (a 3rd party, my friend got from someone who works as a security guard at a hospital because people tend to leave those things a lot) but it's among the ones my phone fails to recognize now.

Come to think of it, about three weeks ago I had a problem with Market wanting to continually update while I was attempting to tether data to my laptop out in the "wilderness" as I like to call it, and it kept making the phone want to overheat because it was also on roaming. It would never overheat just on normal tether, but if it was trying to perform Market updates (particularly Maps and Facebook applications which have no settings to disable auto-update) it would almost predictably overheat even on outlet charge, screen off, and doing nothing else with the phone (no tether, no calls, no nothing). I remember taking the back off the phone, laying it face down in front of a large oscillating fan, and letting it just sit like that plugged into the wall while it kept wanting to update Maps, over and over. So one night when I was half asleep I went through running applications and services and just started arbitrarily killing things that seemed related. The next day I had no problems and it charged successfully that night without telling me the temperature was too high to suspend charging, etc. etc.

I think I'm starting to see a pattern here.

---------- Post added at 03:27 PM ---------- Previous post was at 03:17 PM ----------

Going from G1 to Epic made me feel like I couldn't do jack with the keyboard for awhile (I still think it's a lot slower to type). Now if I pick up a Droid 2 the hardware keyboard feels entirely useless to me. When I had my Epic totally replaced, the new one they gave me (a second revision of the hardware, or different refurbished spare parts?) has a better-feeling response to buttons with each keystroke. So I don't know. I guess it's just learned dexterity and aesthetic preference.