Carat app offers smartphone users longer battery life
updated 09:37 am EDT, Fri June 15, 2012
Carat checks for power hogs, bugs to improve battery life
Carat, a new app for iOS (Free, iTunes) and Android (Free, Google Play), has been designed to give users a personalized set of recommendations on their app usage to help extend their battery life. Developed by a team of UC Berkeley researchers, the free app collects data in the background and requires a few days of collection before it can offer recommendations. The anonymous crowd sourced data is sent back to UC Berkeley servers where complex algorithms are applied and a user’s results compared with others before the recommendations are offered.
The developers refer to the app as a ‘collaborative energy debugger’ as the app will identify when other apps could be using more power than they normally would as a result of a bug. Based on this determination, the app will advise a user to either restart or reinstall the app, or upgrade their OS if necessary. The researchers are offering the app free as the anonymously crowd sourced information is helping them with their research into extending mobile battery life.
Feedback from the app also advises users how much additional battery life they will get if they stop using the app. Known power hogs uncovered so far include Skype, Yelp and Pandora with the advice being that they be switched off whenever they are not in use, rather than being left running in the background. Carat's data is also expected to help app developers find ways of better optimizing their apps, as well as help them uncover bugs that are causing an unnecessary drain on a system resources. [via TechCrunch]
