Find out which apps are using Battery Life

Question

My devices are having power issues. The battery is not lasting as long as we would like.

There are several components that I could guess are causing the battery issues.

Right now the best way I can see to find the culprit is to go through one by one and disable each of them, then conduct a test (that is about 6 hours long).

To get a true view of what is going on this would mean weeks of testing each part.

Is there a better way? Something that can measure power consumption on a windows mobile device? Maybe show battery drain against CPU cycles or something like that?

Any help is appreciated.

Answer 1

There's really very little software is going to be able to do to show you what your power consumption is. Some batteries can provide information, but that assumes that you have a device that has one of those batteries and that the driver is making use of that ability. It's also not always terribly accurate, so even if you did have a device that had that battery and that had a driver that supported it, I'm still not sure I'd trust it.

Personally I'd solder some wires into the battery terminals and put in a meter to look at the amperage draw. I'd then start and stop different apps and see what's going on.

A different tack would be to run something like Kernel Tracker (comes with the eval version of Platform Builder. It can show you every thread scheduled, and from that you can try to deduce which app is getting a lot of processor time, and thereby using more power. Keep in mind, though, that things like radios and the backlight probably draw way more power than the processor.