Measuring the Power Consumption of Smartphones

Abstract

Smartphones are becoming a part of everyday life and as such, a better understanding of hardware and software power consumption is crucial to develop more efficient smartphones. In order to extend battery life, application developers and phone designers must become aware of the limitations of a phone’s CPU power, as well as the LCD display consumption and connectivity via WiFi, 3G, and GPS systems. We present power consumption measurements of an HTC Incredible S and compare these results to known analytical models. The evaluation shows that power consumption is considerably varying with different types of smartphones and that well known models underestimate the actual consumption. The results illustrate that touching the screen nearly doubles the power consumption , which is not captured by any analytical model. Moreover, we present in which way the transmitted packet size of WiFi and cellular communications affect the power consumption.