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Smartphone energy management – at last there is an app for that!

Carat

The World Bank issued a report yesterday showing that the number of mobile phone subscriptions in use worldwide, both pre-paid and post-paid, has now reached over 6 billion.

The report went on to reveal that more than 30 billion mobile applications, or “apps,” were downloaded in 2011 alone – these apps extend the capabilities of phones, for instance to become mobile wallets, navigational aids or price comparison tools. However the apps also have a cost associated with their use – they drain the phone’s battery.

Carat - smartphone energy managament

Some of these apps are energy hogs – they require a lot of energy to run, and so they drain the phone’s battery quickly (maybe they are legitimately using the camera, the GPS radio, and the 3G network simultaneously). Other apps have bugs in them whereby they may not properly close out battery use after a particular function and they continue to drain the battery. Until now, there has been no way to identify which apps were the ones draining your battery’s charge.

I have written a couple of times here before wondering why there was no energy management app for smart phones. Now there is – Carat.

Carat has been developed by a very small team at the Algorithms, Machines, and People Laboratory (AMP Lab) in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (EECS) Department at UC Berkeley, in collaboration with the Department of Computer Science at the University of Helsinki.

The app is free and available for both the iOS and Android platforms. And the client-side code has been uploaded to Github, where anyone can download it, and if they have the development chops, potentially fix any issues they find, or even improve on the app.

As every Smartphone owner knows, battery life is a massive problem. Carat discovered just how big a problem when TechCrunch wrote a piece about the app a few weeks ago. Carat had estimated that they’d pick up an extra 10,000 users as a result of the article. Instead 250,000 people installed the app on their phones and Carat had to scramble to deal with the massive, influx of data.

As can be seen from the image above, Carat gives you advice on ways to get longer life from the battery in your smartphone by identifying Battery Hogs (apps that use a lot of energy), apps with energy bugs and advising on how much extra battery life you will save by re-starting or killing the app.

Carat also reports your J-Score:
Carat J-Score

The J-Score is “the percentile battery life you see relative to all other devices being measured by Carat”, so the J-Score of 54 reported for my phone means my expected battery life is better than 54% of Carat’s users.

One thing to be aware of is that because Carat needs a certain threshold of application usage before it can report accurately on your apps, it typically takes a weeks usage before it starts advising you on how to get better battery life for your device.

Speaking to Carat developer Adam Oliner last week he informed me that some of the next steps for the app will be to publish api’s so that app developers will have better access to the energy consumption info of their applications.

What is interesting about this app is that it was developed as a research project, and not by one of the Smartphone Endpoint Management providers. You’d have thought saving their customers money and reducing their emissions (through using less energy), while keeping their employees more productive (by prolonging the battery life of their smartphones) would have been a no-brainer.

Perhaps, now that it has been shown that this is possible, we’ll see more of these types of apps emerge.

Image credit Tom Raftery

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Smartphone energy management – when will there be an app for that?

Mobile energy saving app?

I wrote a post last week about mobile endpoint management applications and their potential to extend smartphone battery life. It seems it was a prescient piece given the emergence this week of a study from Purdue University and Microsoft Research showing how energy is used by some smartphone applications [PDF].

The study indicates that many free, ad-supported applications expend most of their energy on serving the ads, as opposed to on the application itself. As an example, the core part of the free version of Angry Birds on Android uses only 18% of the total app energy. Most of the rest of the energy is used in gathering location, and handset details for upload to the ad server, downloading the ad, and the 3G tail.

This behaviour was similar in other free apps, such as Free Chess, NYTimes which were tested on Android and an energy bug found in Facebook causing the app to drain power even after termination, was confirmed fixed in the next version released (v1.3.1).

The researchers also performed this testing on Windows Mobile 6.5 but in the published paper, only the Android results are discussed.

Inmobi’s Terence Egan pushed back against some of the findings noting that

In one case, the researchers only looked at the first 33 seconds of usage when playing a chess game.

Naturally, at start up, an app will open communications to download an ad. Once the ad has been received, the app shouldn?t poll for another ad for some time.

Hver the time it take to play a game of chess (the computer usually beats me in 10 minutes) a few ad calls are dwarfed by the energy consumption of the screen, the speakers, and the haptic feedback.

Although, in a tacit admission that this is a potential issue further down in his post he lists handy best practices for developers to make “ad calls as battery friendly as possible”

The iPhone iOS operating system wasn’t looked at in this study at all but it is not immune from these issues either. And, in fact, reports are emerging now that the new iPad is unable to charge when certain energy intensive apps are running.

While it is important to remind developers of the need for green coding, not all coders will heed the advice and there will always be rogue apps out there draining your smartphone’s battery.

And this is not just a consumer issue – for enterprises it is important to keep the organisation’s smartphone owners happy, connected, and above all, productive. A drained battery is ultimately a disconnected, unproductive and frustrated employee. Reducing a phone’s energy use is, obviously a sustainability win too.

Mobile endpoint management applications could use technology similar to the eprof software used in the study, to identify bugs or rogue applications on phones. This could be reported back to a central database to alert users (and app developers) of issues found.

With more and more apps coming on the market, this is an issue which is only going to become more pronounced. Someone is going to come out with a decent mobile energy management app sooner, rather than later. It will be interesting to see where it comes from.

Photo Credit Tom Raftery

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Apple just got a whole lot Greener!

Mac OS X Snow Leopard

Photo credit hildgrim

Like Symantec, Apple too have a significant Green story that they are not telling – and it just got a lot Greener!

Why do I say they have a Green story in the first place? Aren’t they just constantly exhorting us to buy their products? How is that sustainable?

Well, let me start by making a confession – I am an Apple fanboy. I love their kit. I bought my first computer (a used Apple Mac SE FDHD) back in 1989 and ever since then, even when I worked as a Windows Sysadmin, my own personal machine has always been a Mac.

When Apple brought out their 3G iPhone, I bought one of those too. And I loved it. The device was, without doubt, a defining moment in the history of mobile phones. And this is where Apple’s Green story started to become more obvious to me. My previous phones had, for almost all the previous 12 years, been Nokia’s. The average lifetime of my Nokia handsets was typically less than a year (usually 6-9 months). A new mobile would come out with the next killer feature, and I’d shell out.

iPhone App Store

iPhone App Store

However, with the iPhone 3G, Apple kept upgrading the operating system, adding more and more functionality, and making it freely available for download directly onto the phone. This meant I was able to get all the new functionality, without having to buy any new hardware. This is a definite dematerialisation win – it takes a lot less carbon to download a new operating system, than to buy a new phone.

At the same time, Apple launched the App store for the iPhone. This meant you could go to a library of programs written specifically for the iPhone and download one directly for your mobile if it had functionality (or a game!) you wanted. This ability to easily extend the functionality of the devices at will, also meant they tended to have a longer working life.

When I did finally upgrade from the iPhone 3G, to the iPhone 4 (2 years later), I had a buyer already lined up for the iPhone 3G, so it lives on (and is still much loved by its new owner!).

Similarly, Apple’s Mac hardware is hugely desirable. Every one of my Mac desktops and laptops has been passed on after I have finished with them. Macs are always in demand, even second hand. I never have a problem finding someone to take a used Mac off my hands. On the other hand, I have a Sony Viao laptop from 2007 that I couldn’t give away!

So why do I say Apple just got a lot Greener?

Because Apple recently announced that it is now creating a Mac App store. This is a superb move. As of Oct 20th 2010 Apple had 7bn application downloads from its existing iPhone app store (it launched in mid-2008). For many reasons, the Mac app store will be highly unlikely to have as many downloads in the same period of time, but even if it shifts a mere 7m apps from being physically created and shipped, to being simply downloaded, that is a big carbon saving.

This is not just good news for Apple though – I mentioned here a while back that Adobe were charging people more for a downloadable copies of their software than for shipped physical copies of the same software! This obviously makes no sense but is a result of vagaries of EU taxation which Adobe neglected to factor into their pricing and as a result they are actively encouraging people to purchase physical copies of their products!

In the (albeit highly unlikely) event that Adobe were to sell their software through the Mac app store, then they could hand off the responsibility for worrying about EU tax and pricing issues to Apple.

Will Microsoft and other large vendors let Apple let Apple sell their software for them? They’d be crazy not to.

By going with the mac App store they get a software shop delivered straight onto every Mac owner’s desktop (you can be sure the Mac app store will be part of the desktop with OS X Lion when it ships, as well as an update for all other systems). They also get a ready-made way to reduce the carbon emissions (and media, packaging and freight costs) associated with every software sale!

Now Apple have a history of being market leaders (witness their creation recently of the tablet market with the launch of their iPad). There is no doubt that other vendors will quickly follow Apple’s lead in creating online stores for their software – does this mean the era of software being shipped by courier or through the post is coming to an end? Let’s hope so.

All that and we haven’t even talked about what iTunes did for music CDs or what the Apple TV will do to rid the world of pesky, scratch-prone, physical DVDs!