I own a Nokia N900. Some applications are ported straight from regular
Linux and they're definitely power-naive, as they have little or no
optimization for mobile. I agree that this is not "sloppy" or "bad", it's
just that mobile (low power) wasn't the intended target of the application
when it was written, and this commonly shows.
Just like some people will burn CPU cycles by writing their application in
a high-level language because it requires fewer man-hours and that you get
thousands of cpu-hours for the cost of a man-hour programming the thing
(often by externalising the true cost of power which makes power even less
of a problem), not caring much about power is rational behaviour when
creating an application for pc.
Just look at flash ads, they consume huge amounts of power and they
commonly never stop. I imagine that the power used by PCs around the world
displaying web pages with advertising with the monitor in power-save mode
(powered down) can be counted in gigawatts. When I need my battery to last
on my laptop I make sure I don't have any unneccessary tabs enabled
because it seriously affects my battery time. I think laptop users would
benefit from more power optimized applications as well, so if the OS could
do the same for laptop/desktop use as well (spending less time on programs
updating display when the display is off), I think there are real world
benefits for every desktop/laptop/mobile user.
If nothing else, it's environmentally friendly.
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Mikael Abrahamsson email: swmike@swm.pp.se
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