One of the major misconceptions around haptics that we’ve heard is that developers are afraid haptics suck the battery life of phones…turns out haptics have minimal impact on battery consumption. In fact, the battery impact is akin to the impact a car radio has on your fuel efficiency.
It’s an understandable mistake. The little motor inside the phone is the only moving part in a handset. If it moves, people think it must consume power.
The reality is that the motors in phones like the Samsung Galaxy S line are “resonant” motors, meaning their power consumption is more like an audio speaker than a conventional motor. Enter in my car radio analogy.
We’ve done some analysis and looked at the worst case usage for different handsets in a single 24 hour period:
-Dialing 25 calls (you are apparently very popular)
-Typing e-mails for four hours at 40 words per minute (your fingers must get tired)
-Sending 50 full 140 character text messages (for those people you didn’t feel like calling)
-Playing games for two hours (don’t know where you find the time)
After all this phone activity, having haptics on every key press, every game explosion and throughout the UI, you are looking at haptics consuming less than one percent of the battery.
The reality is if you used a typical handset this way, your display and CPU would have gobbled up the battery long before your day was up. The power you save by turning off the haptics in a phone won’t save you enough to get you through one level of Angry Birds. If you want to learn more, check out our Power Consumption Analysis whitepaper.
(photo credit to Longzero via Flicker)