An Analysis of Screen Resolution Effects on Battery Endurance: A Case of Smartphones

Most computing capabilities are fast migrating from hardware to software. Despite this having a tendency of lowering energy consumption within devices, increase in computing capacity, improved display capabilities, and huge memory demands cancel out optimal energy savings. Software developers have to rely on code instrumentation as the sole source of data to apply energy optimisation techniques. However, code instrumentation abstracts hardware features and rely on logs from software modules to represent energy consumption. Test cases have to be carefully planned as well to have meaningful logs, as use cases are usually diverse for mobile. Apart from reviewing techniques used to assess energy consumption on mobile platforms, this paper presents an analysis of hardware advancements on smartphones in an attempt to expose the underlying hardware characteristics which are generally abstracted to software developers. An understanding of such features is essential as software in itself does not consume energy, but does that indirectly through hardware it controls. Software projects can then be planned and designed to match the hardware characteristics without compromising much on energy consumption.