Battery Life With & Without 'Mobile Data'

Minimal setting = longer battery life 😀
The background apps are also in the list of battery eaters ☕

Of course mobile data eats battery much faster. I have checked it with a power monitoring application on my Symbian phone Nokia E63.

From my Symbian experience.
There is an app called energy profiler by Nokia that Monitors the power usage, current, data transfer rate, CPU, ram and wifi usage of the phone. While my phone is in standby (that is with no background apps, no gprs attached, back-light off and energy saver screen-saver running) my phone consumes 0.02w to 0.04 watts power.
While the back-light is on with no screen-saver, the consumption is about 0.12 to 0.15 watts. If my gprs is attached, the usage becomes 0.18 to 0.21 watts with same conditions. But still the standby usage is almost same 0.02w to 0.06w, but not steady with occasional high peaks in power consumption graph. While downloading the usage was between 1.3 to 1.5W. (not 3G)

The display brightness also reflected the power consumption. In my case, it wasnt very much significant in the instantaneous value of consumed power, but in the long run, a less bright display will save much energy.

The worst was with the automatic wifi scanning enabled. Each scan consumed more than 1W. In the power usage graph, there were these 1 watt peaks at regular intervals.

Blue-tooth works on battery too. With the blue-tooth turned on in the background, the consumption was around 0.18 to 0.21 watts. And there were occasional peaks in power usage, don't know why that happened. The peaks were not there when the blue-tooth was turned off. So I think it has something to do with the blue-tooth.

Couldn't test the GPS since my phone missed one.

I recommend to turn off automatic wifi scanning and switch off blue-tooth when not in use and also to decrease the brightness maximum to a level things are readable on screen. And also to switch off the mobile data if a possibility to recharge is too far away.

In sinple terns, there is an additional hardware gor wifi and 3g. If you turn that on what yoy are doing is activating additional circuitary. Pretty ovbious that it will consume some power. Hence reducing the battery life.

Like wise Blue tooth active mobiles drain much faster than those which use wired head phones

this is due to more power consumed by the transmitter in the cell consuming power