Playing around with my phone

It's been a few days now since I noticed that the battery on my Nokia N81-8GB is starting to discharge a little faster. I think it might die on me. Or maybe I installed some sort of application recently that's using it. Or just maybe I used the phone more during this period.

In any case, I was looking around on Nokia's Ovi Store and I accidentally found an application that shows you in real time the power consumption on your phone. The app is called Energy Profiler, ver. 1.22. Because it was free, I decided to give it a try and see what it does. After reading the instructions I got a little more details about it. It seems to be intended as an "S60 development tool that enables programmers to optimize software for maximum battery time by profiling power consumption of applications". Or at least that's what the Help file said. It computes the power consumption by reading the built-in current meter once every 0.25 seconds and the voltage meter every 10 seconds.

What I really liked at it was the fact that you can save your recorded measurement and the fact that you can export them as PNG or SVG file. Bellow I added two images created with this application, recording power consumption while performing some tasks on my phone.

What I noticed from these is that wireless connections consume more power than Bluetooth and browsing and streaming video consume a lot more. I forgot to try a Bluetooth file transfer or communication with another Bluetooth device, but I expect it to bee lower than browsing. I was surprised that listening to music doesn't consume that much. Taking that picture with flash turned on was killer, almost 4W. And even moving the camera around uses more power than listening to music. I really enjoyed the fact that when the screen is turned off, the power consumption is close to 0. So it really does save power.

Anyway, that seems interesting. And this application does have a lot of other features, but not being involved with mobile phone programming, I can't really appreciate them to their real value.

Are these readings normal? If anyone else has done this kind of tests on a Nokia N81-8GB, please let me know. I'm really curious to see if there are any differences.