Smartphones are more and more sophisticated and more and more energy intensive. The energy consumption of a smartphone is calculated from the amount of energy it uses to be able to function. Thus, we have seen a growing gap between the energy stored by the batteries and the energy consumed by the components of the phones. Controlling the consumption of your smartphone therefore involves controlling its use and the use of its components.
Understanding the consumption of your smartphone
The energy consumption of a smartphone corresponds to the energy expenditure necessary for the hardware components of the phone to function. This expense is induced by the activity of the software on the phone. Thus, the execution of increasingly advanced applications demand more and more resources from the components of the telephone, which require more energy to operate. In addition to user activity, certain external factors can affect the phone’s consumption: extreme temperatures, network search, etc.
There are three activity levels for the components:
Active: the application processor is operational and running: screen on and components in activity. This is where the energy consumed is the highest, although it varies according to use.
Idle: Application processor is idle, phone activity is low even though it is connected. The power consumed is limited and varies little.
Tail: The device is not inactive, but no application is running. Some components continue to run with activities in the background even after use, such as GPS for example. Consumption thus remains high even after their activity.
Understanding the sources of consumption
It is the components of the smartphone that consume the most energy: the use of software, apps, calls on the various components which thus consume energy. The main hardware components to watch out for are: processor, memory, storage, display, GPS, and network interfaces. Smartphones are in fact hyper-connected and offer different interfaces for accessing several networks: Bluetooth, wifi, NFC, etc. These many hardware components consume power all the time on your smartphone and even more when they are in use. Each app, web browsing, calls, SMS and data transfer are particularly energy intensive, but the record is held by multimedia features such as streaming and games.
These are the two main activities that you must succeed in limiting in order to consume as little energy as possible with your smartphone.
How to monitor energy consumption
Recent smartphones are equipped with more advanced systems that allow you in particular to clean your software, manage caching but also more extensively the various demands on the battery in order to limit energy expenditure.
They are all equipped with a “battery saver” feature, even for some “extreme saver”, which offers a simplified version to limit the consumption of the telephone.
What solutions to control the consumption of your smartphone?
If you really want to limit the consumption of your phone, you will have to learn how to better manage it:
If several actions can allow you to save the energy consumed by your phone, such as, for example, removing wallpapers, removing notifications from your favorite apps and limiting multimedia uses and games, they also limit your use. Of the phone and indeed his interest.
Manufacturers are looking for innovative battery solutions that would make it possible to be better adapted to smartphones, but in the immediate future it is still in the research stage.
Among the simplest actions to reduce energy consumption, we find especially:
Learning to control charges: Using a good charger and using the phone’s charge correctly can make a real difference.
Use the phone’s cleaning and feature management tools to optimize performance.
Switch to the cloud: by offloading some of the tasks to a cloud, the smartphone can considerably reduce its energy consumption.
Managing network interfaces as best as possible: limiting network activity (cutting off Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, switching to the airplane mode at night) when the phone is at rest also allows you to save on your energy consumption.
If a change in user behavior can allow a decrease in the energy consumption of a smartphone, several innovations are also expected from manufacturers to allow consistency of new uses and components.