How is energy consumed in smartphone display applications?
Smartphones have emerged as a popular and frequently used platform for the consumption of multimedia. New display technologies, such as AMOLED, have been recently introduced to smartphones to fulfill the requirements of these multimedia applications. However, as an AMOLED screen's power consumption is determined by the display content, such applications are often limited by the battery life of the device they are running on, inspiring many researches to develop new power management schemes. In this work, we evaluate the power consumption of several applications on a series of Samsung smartphones and take a deep look into AMOLED's power consumption and its relative contributions for multimedia apps. We improve AMOLED power analysis by considering the dynamic factors in displaying, and analyze the individual factors affecting power consumption when streaming video, playing a video game, and recording video via a device's built-in camera. Our detailed measurements refine the power analysis of smartphones and reveal some interesting perspectives regarding the power consumption of AMOLED displays in multimedia applications. © 2013 ACM.
