What do you use your computer for? Surfing Internet, chat, gaming, social networking, downloading, desktop computing including documents, spreadsheets or presentation making or just watching your photos and videos? Today’s mobile phones are capable of doing it all, rather sometimes more than the traditional phones. They have faster processors, more ram, faster wireless Internet connectivity and larger memories.
Today I will start another series of posts that will tell you how to use your phones to do things that you usually do with your computers including desktops, laptops and netbooks. This series of posts will include tips, tricks and software that you can use to avoid the use of computers and just use your phone 🙂
Why are mobile phones better?
If you have not done so, you can read my earlier articles that prove that laptops are better than desktops, because they take around 60 watts of power as compared to a few hundred watts. Then we also discussed that netbooks are even better than laptops taking half the power as compared to a full sized notebook. Today we will move one step ahead.
To prove my point I used this app called Nokia Energy Profiler. The app is a free download available on Nokia OVI store for almost all Nokia devices. The application gives you exact numbers in terms of power consumption, network bandwidth utilization and a few more important things that you never come to know when using a mobile phone. Just like any other computing device, Nokia phones consume low power when idle and take more power when performing more computation.
Here are a few screen-shots. As you can see, when the phone is idle, it takes 0.18 watts on average. When navigating the menu and viewing simple content like photos on the phone screen, its consuming 0.23 watts on average. In the third screenshot, the phone is being used for a voice+video call over a wifi network and the battery usage is at it’s top, that is around 2 watts.
In the last screen shot you can see the sudden rise in battery consumption when there’s an incoming call ringing and picked up.
In any case, this particular cellphone is using less than 2 watts of power which is way less than the other computing devices we listed above.
Conclusion
Use mobile phones for your computing needs whenever and wherever possible. You’ll save power and will contribute your efforts in keeping this planet green. Happy Green Computing!