Eero Tamminen wrote: > You use extra hardware for that, not software. :-) Extra hardware may not be needed. > But anyway, that is not really relevant information when talking > about applications. The question is not how much doing a thing > consumes power, but is doing that thing really something that needs > to be done. True. But still seeing power consumption could help and having actual current drawn from battery somewhere in /proc would be very useful in many situations. Even if I agree with things you said I still think your response is influenced by the fact that Nokia hides such values from us (either because it is not possible due to current hw design or because it thinks such information is sensitive). I had iPAQ 3870 and there was such value available. It helped me a lot (both as user and programmer) to understand what is the cost of having some features enabled (playing audio, brightness on higher level, bluetooth communication, cpu busy, reading from card, ...). Things are not black and white. Maybe sometimes something doesn't need to be done. If you know the costs you may avoid some features or try to optimize its usage in your application. If you don't know the consumption then you can't optimize (both as user and developer). Examples of such optimizations: It is worthwhile to implement caching network data to mmc card while playing media (i.e. read playlist ahead as fast as possible from network) or is streaming on demand good enough? Does the brightness consumes as much as I expect? How much do I save when turning volume down? Does black theme save power? These were just examples and some of them may not be good but you should still see the point. Frantisek
