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AT&T researchers call for smartphone apps that won't suck your battery dry

Who doesn't love Pandora Radio? But listening to it on my Android phone is the fastest way to kill the battery and what good is a mobile phone if it has to be constantly plugged in? New research shows that Android phones are the most data hungry smartphones out there. A group of researchers at AT&T Labs are calling on app makers to fix this problem by building more energy-aware apps. Not surprisingly, Pandora is one of their test subjects. (Facebook is another).

It's about time! All smartphones could use more energy efficient apps, but Android users suffer the most. New research from Nielsen found that although iPhone users engage in as much or more data-intensive activities (downloading apps, streaming music or video), as Android users, Andorid phones gobble up more monthly data . Each month, Androids are consuming 90MB more data than iPhone users.

As every smartphone user knows, the more data transferred, the faster the battery drains. But apparently it's not the OS that's the issue ... its the underlying apps, researchers say.

Enter new research being done by AT&T to create energy-efficient apps that recognize they are on a cell network, and limit both the number of times an app connects to the network and the time needed to connect. They have developed a tool that helps app developers figure out when their apps really need full power connections (download speeds of around 7.1 Mbits/sec) or when the app can get by on a proposed "intermediate state" which consumes half the power and transmits less data at a slower speed, typically by sharing a low-speed channel, (often 16 kbps).