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If you have played with an android for any length of time, you may have noticed the neat battery tracking feature in the Android OS. When the battery reaches 15% the device will warn you that it’s low on power, and there’s a little button next to that that says simply “Why?”. Click on “why?” and the device will give you a nice bar graph breakdown on where the battery went. Here’s a screen cap from the google developer blog, apparently of a device that doesn’t get used much:

This is also a neat feature, because it gives us some insight into the design constraints for modern smartphones. Of course everyone’s millage will vary, but here are the averages across 5 different recharge cycles over a week’s time of daily usage for own android:

Note we’ve lumped together a few things like android core apps, android system, and android OS into one category of “android stuff” cause we’re not really clear on the difference between those things anyway. The foreground apps here were mostly things like gmail, maps, some foursquare etc.

A few other observations: holy cow do screens suck power! Still want that big beautiful screen on your next smart phone? Also power usage of background apps is highly sensitive to their update frequency. Apps like background news readers or twitter apps can actually suck up to 30% of your battery (we had this problem at first) until you tune down their update frequency. This is definitely something app devolopers should be sensitive to too.

How does your usage vary? let us know in the comments.