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Random thoughts about mobile (enterprise) application development.

Mind the battery

widianuser | 29 March, 2007 08:12

Last weekend I had a small vacation, took cheap flight and visited a new city. While enjoying the sights of Riga I made a field test
with my N93, trying to use it in as "converged" fashion as I could. So I packed my device with

and of course I used N93's browser, messaging, camera and WLAN connectivity with the applications listed above.

The experiment started fine and one by one I got every application to work. When I let the applications run simultaneously the problems started: sudden terminal reboots, memory low messages, lost pictures. Well, I had been expecting problems with memory consumption, after all there were lots of stuff to keep in RAM. Also I was prepared to see shortened battery life because of Bluetooth and WLAN usage, but the result was much worse than I had expected: the device battery ran empty 4 hours after it had been disconnected from the charger. With my typical use with lots of talking and messaging the terminal keeps going for days without a battery recharge. In this small test "convergence" became "denial of service" when empty battery made device useless for the rest of the day.

Here is my humble request to all of you, fellow developers: please keep in mind battery usage when designing the next killer application. If your application dries the battery within an hours, your application is really a killer, but only a terminal killer.

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Comments

Re: Mind the battery

mollevp | 30/03/2007, 11:28

Hi Harri,
I agree that this certainly seems to be overlooked topic in many mobile software development projects. However, I feel that the topic is getting more and more attention especially as a potential research area - and also in literature the subject is now surfacing. In the newly published book "Mobile Phone Programming and its Application to Wireless Networking" there is a couple of chapters devoted to this topic. In one of the chapters "Optimizing Mobile Software with Built-in Power Profiling - Everybody can make the battery last longer", I feel the authors really motivate the topic nicely. One quote that I think really hits the nail on the head:

"In a world where similar applications compete, better battery time performance can give application vendors a competitive edge over the rest. For example, two different web browser or e-mail client application offerings could have a similar set of features, but one allows for 2 hours more browsing or 5 days more push e-mail standby time. Battery life already plays a differentiating role in some embedded devices such as portable media players."

Check it out at:
http://mobiledevices.kom.aau.dk/publications/mobile_phone_programming_book/

Best Regards,
Morten @ Mobile Devices Team - AAU
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