Comments on: iPhone Wish List Items: Show Us What’s been Sucking Up Battery During a Day?

By: Ivan Williams

Ivan Williams — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 23:11:24 +0000

Considering the debates we face with regards to battery life, I think this is a brilliant idea. Where do I sign up? I want to be first 🙂

By: patrickj

patrickj — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 21:57:02 +0000

Me too.

By: patrickj

patrickj — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 21:56:42 +0000

Yeah, this is very much my impression as well. I don't even recall ever seeing this level of monitoring on a laptop.

By: Diego D. Petrucci

Diego D. Petrucci — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 21:22:48 +0000

It would be a killer app, and i’d surely pay for it even if it’d be a jb app

By: FrankCatalano

FrankCatalano — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 21:21:18 +0000

I was actually just thinking about my battery usage…. Since I have jailbroke my iPhone about 2 wks. ago I have not been experiencing battery issues until about 2 days ago. I have stopped using MultiFl0w which had helped out quite a bit. I really like that app & have been using the trial version, but since deleting it my battery has improved. I can estimate when before I jailbroke I charged my phone every other day…. I now have to charge my phone everyday & often run out of power by the afternoon. I guess this is a price to pay to have everything I want on my iPhone…. I added a battery case to my Christmas List…

By: Martin

Martin — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 21:15:43 +0000

Best idea for an app i heard all year.
I really hope someone makes this jailbreak or no jailbreak i dont care. I just want it 🙂

By: sysrage

sysrage — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 20:22:32 +0000

I love the idea and wish it could happen, but it seems to be that it would be extremely difficult to implement. Apps don't exactly pull directly from the battery or have their own specific power usage reporting. The utility would somehow need to (very intelligently) combine CPU usage, memory usage, storage usage, sound usage, video usage, and most of all network usage. Network usage would have to be smart enough to know the different power usage between wifi, 3g, edge, bluetooth, gps, and whatever else.

Heck, get me an app that shows me all that information broken down and I'd be amazed (and happy). CPU, memory, and disk are easy. That data is there and can be seen with 'top'. But all the rest, I'm not sure it would even be possible to accurately poll, let alone intelligently combine all the data to get an even somewhat accurate 'power use per app' reading.

Again, great idea and we can dream, but I don't think it's likely to be done. Somebody could definitely start putting together a very 'rough' meter that shows which apps use the most resources and that could vaguely be pushed on to a power use scenario. But accurate, even slightly, probably not so much.