Android News
Flash not so bad on battery life after all, according to tests on a Nexus One
February 25, 2010 | by Andrew Kameka
Android News
Much has been said about Steve Job’s questionable statement that Flash would have killed 90% of the iPad’s battery life. Even though that’s a ridiculous statement, it did make several people wonder just how taxing Flash can be on a mobile device’s battery.
Mark Doherty has uploaded a blog post with video support detailing Flash’s effect on a Nexus One. Doherty used a combination of scenarios to test how a Nexus One would react to playing Flash content, and he discovered that a user could play a YouTube video for more than three hours on WiFi without killing the N1′s battery.
Keeping a screen on for an extended period of time obviously affects battery life; even watching a locally- stored MP4 file would put a dent in available power. But the mere presence of Flash or using Flash content doesn’t seem to adversely affect the Nexus One’s battery performance according to Doherty. The blog post details the methods for testing and an Adobe colleague joins in with his own testing. Read both posts in full here:
3 hours over wi-fi doesn't sound bad, but Google rates the Nexus One for "up to 7 hours" of video playback." Sounds to me like Flash cuts battery life in half. That's a serious problem.
7 hours is the max best case scenario. In most real-life instances, you're probably getting a little less than that – and that's through local playback. This example is STREAMING video on WiFi. Every phone I've owned has lost battery considerably by having WiFi on, so I wouldn't go as far to say Flash cuts it in half.
Unrelatedly, do you happen to know whether it's WiFi or 3D connectivity that's heavier on the battery? I always thought 3G was a real battery hog, but I noticed the Droid automatically cuts off the WiFi connection when the screen is off, while keeping 3G on all the time.
WiFi is denitely the larger drain on battery.
I'm not aware of any official word on this because I often see people say Wi-Fi consumes less than 3G, but that may depend on your phone model and the 3G chip used.
Ive left my phone with WiFi on when going to sleep and woke up to see the battery practically dead. if I go to sleep with 3G on, the battery is down but not as much.
Per Google, Nexus One gets 7 hours of video playback and 6.5 hours of WiFi. These are not concurrent ratings – you get one or the other (that’s how everyone, including Apple, does their battery life specs). Put them together, and getting half of each (or 3.3 hours of video + WiFi) is spot on, meaning Flash probably has negligible effect on battery life.
This is the most inane load of rubbish I have ever heard. That is like saying that travelling to New York from DC takes 5 hours, and travelling to Philadelphia takes 3 hours from DC, so going to both Philly and NY will take 8 hours!
Can we get some facts into this discussion!
Has anyone actually done a real world test on their own as to how long the Nexus One will play a you tube video now without flash? Ill bet you its not much more than a flash based video. 43.5 to 4hrs max.
The bottom line battery killer is really the screen brightness. If you have ever looked at screen brightness in the battery menu as to what is using the most battery, its usually 95% screen and everything else comes afterwards.
But do a real world test on what we have currently before making such comparisons & dogging on flash. This is the 1st Phone finally to get flash! What a great jump in technology, be happy!
Yes lets be happy that we will continue to encode video that could be encoded in a standard format without the need for a proprietary wrapper into a sub-optimal proprietary wrapper! Oh I am just so happy :