Recently a great Pocket PC application has been released, acbPowerMeter lets you measure the battery load put on your device by various functions like CPU, display, wireless radio, speaker, etc.

"Battery life is very important with PDA's, especially if you don't have any chance to charge them or swap batteries while on the move. Then, every additional minute you can squeeze out from the battery may be important. In this article, I show you what you can do in order to optimize battery life."

That's what Werner Ruotsalainen, AKA Menneisyys, has written on his in-depth article.

abcPowerMeter has some great features like weighted moving average to chart, overall average and total power (mAh) consumed to display. Also added pause/resume and x-axis labels.

Here are some real world examples: "A test to compare with the Alpha version of Agile messenger running. And it confirms what many have thought, it's a battery eater ! We started with as low as 102mA and as high as 460mA while Agile was running. It seems like whenever it connects to the network is when the super high usage spikes would happen, but it appears to constantly be doing that. On the other hand, my push email client doesn't hit battery life at all."

 

Yet another test with Skype for Pocket PC, Here's a capture of Skype's major power drain. If you, like me, would like to use Skype to replace voice calling, but because of battery use cannot ! Starts with no data connection, around 30 mA.
First spike is connecting to data over EVDO and IE download
Another minute of around 30 mA with data connected but no active transfers
Then started Skype. As you can see, the average use with Skype running was around 400 mA. During this time, I made no calls or chats.
Exited Skype at end, left data connection on, dropped back to about 30 mA.

 

The conclusion for me is that all those colorful applications that has recently hits the market are only about to drain our battery power in less time. Testing which applications drains less is a good practice in order to keep the handheld alive for as long as it can.