Reality Check: The hunt for longer battery life – a necessary evil for operators, device manufacturers and application providers

Editor’s Note: Welcome to our weekly Reality Check column. We’ve gathered a group of visionaries and veterans in the mobile industry to give their insights into the marketplace.
Battery-life technology has fallen behind and has not kept up with the incredible progress made in other technology areas of the mobile industry such as the delivery of richer services and applications on an increasingly wider set of devices. Because battery life can have an incredibly positive or negative impact on a user’s experience with a mobile device, it is an area of concern for all parties involved in the delivery of services: device manufacturers, application providers and wireless operators.
Several components of the device make significant use of the battery, including the radio, which gets turned on and off anytime an application requests to obtain or send information. The worst-case scenario is obviously when the radio is turned on while there is no information to be transported. Unfortunately, this worst-case scenario is behind “interval polling,” which is still one of the most commonly used synchronization approaches. With “interval polling,” the mobile device checks for information updates with the backend server at regular intervals, generally set to anything from a few minutes to a couple of hours. “Interval polling” systematically uses the radio even if no updates need to be delivered. Many leading devices, including BlackBerries and iPhones, rely on more sophisticated and efficient approaches based on push notifications where the server is in charge of notifying the device when updates such as new email messages are available. This is the most direct way to ensure that the radio is only turned on when absolutely needed.
Several techniques related to push notifications can be combined to better control the use of the radio, retrieve information from the network more efficiently, or align the use of the network with the end user’s expectation for data updates. Many of these have been deployed for years on devices with Push Mobile Email and other embedded services that are powered by Seven Networks Inc. They include:
–The systematic reduction of the amount of data transferred: for many applications, the display of application data on a mobile device can be simplified compared to that of a computer screen. Ensuring that unnecessary formatting information is stripped out before packaging an email message for transport decreases the amount of data to be transported, and therefore reduces the amount of time the radio is on;
–The use of a transport protocol that is specifically designed for wireless communication and its constraints: many mobile synchronization technologies have been designed as extensions of what already existed for the web and turn out to be quite inefficient or cannot be extended beyond the transport of data that they were originally designed for;
–The systematic compression of data before transport.
Applying the above techniques has enabled Seven to decrease by a factor of eight the amount of data transported over the network resulting in a much better battery-life experience for the end users.
Another approach to optimize battery life is the use of advanced settings that end users can control and set to match their use of applications. For example, the setting of automatic “quiet times” for business-related mobile applications that are aligned with the end and start of a user’s workday minimizes battery usage.
The above points were described in the overly simplified case where only one application on the device connects to the network to retrieve data. Today’s proliferation of applications on mobile devices brings an even greater challenge with the need to coordinate traffic across applications, control which application gets updates in real-time or which application gets priority over another. When using different synchronization technologies across multiple services, the battery problems are compounded.
Finally, being able to rely on a closed loop system that tracks detailed usage statistics both in terms of frequency and in terms of volume of data transported is critical. The Seven platform captures a great deal of traffic and transaction information and provides valuable feedback to operators and application providers that can help them fine-tune their services and mobile applications with the goal of delivering the best possible battery-life experience.
Isabelle Dumont is senior director of product and corporate marketing at Seven Networks Inc. Dumont is responsible for all global marketing activities, including the overall positioning of the company and its solutions to the market. Dumont brings more than 20 years of software marketing and business planning experience to Seven spanning enterprise, open source, business intelligence and SaaS solutions. Most recently, she was responsible for the Open Source line of business at CollabNet, including marketing, developer community and global sales of Subversion-related solutions and services. Prior to that, she was part of the senior marketing staff at Oracle where she led competitive go-to-market initiatives for the entire Oracle portfolio of products. Before moving to Silicon Valley, Isabelle held several business development and technical positions at IRI Software in Europe where she contributed to the company by opening offices in 12 different European countries. Dumont holds a Master of Computer Sciences and Artificial Intelligence from the Ecole Centrale of Lyon, France.