Analysing power utilisation of N900

Via: @Jaffa2

Editor: Andrew Flegg

Neal Walfield, author of Woodchuck, analyses one of his claims that wifi network access allows better battery life than 3G: To determine whether or not Woodchuck can save energy, we first need to know approximately how much energy the activities we are interested in consume. To measure this, I charged my N900 until the battery was full, then I started some activity and let it run until the device turned off. Every five minutes, I queried the battery's state (voltage, mAh and whether the device was being charged) and wrote it to an SQLite database. The activities that I measured were: streaming or playing an mp3 file at various encodings, downloading over WiFi at different speeds, having the LCD on, and idling.