The screen tends to be one of the biggest consumers of electricity. How much of this is for the backlight vs the actual screen, particularly in the case of an LCD?
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I don't have hard numbers, but it should be nearly all the backlight. That said, I don't think this is an Android question. – Matthew Read Apr 16 '12 at 20:26
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Not strictly, but similar to this question it is still relevant in my opinion. However if there is a more fitting site we could move it too, we definitely should. – Nova Apr 16 '12 at 20:34
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Erik, you're right. I've brought this up on Meta and re-opened this in the meantime. – Matthew Read Apr 16 '12 at 21:04
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I think it's one of those edge cases which is valid. Sure, every smartphone has a battery, but maybe there is something peculiar to the way Android uses the display that would come to bear here (although, frankly, it's almost certainly hardware-specific if anything). That said, it's a really open-ended question and I doubt there's a single, correct answer. – ale Apr 16 '12 at 23:10
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Not only the screen is a main consumer. Based on the Motorola Droid, I can give you some data to compare:
Video recording 1557 mW
UMTS Upload 1410 mW
UMTS Download 1349 mW
EGDE Upload 1179 mW
WLAN Download 1158 mW
Video play (fullscreen) 1135 mW (already minus the display)
UMTS phone call 983 mW
Camera 934 mW
EGDE Download 853 mW
Bluetooth receive 751 mW
Display (at max) 730 mW
GPS Search 550 mW
GSM phone call 511 mW
Bluetooth send 487 mW
WLAN Upload 479 mW
Display (at min) 310 mW
MP3 play 160 mW
UMTS Standby 18,3 mW
GSM/EDGE Standby 11,6 mW
WLAN Standby 7,8 mW
Bluetooth Standby 2,8 mW
GPS Standby 0,4 mW
As you can see, there are clearly compontents/actions with a much higher energy consumptions -- but the display gives you good potential to reserve some.
Data source is an article at Heise.DE called Energiesparplan (google translate version here).
