Nielsen's director of research, Don Kellogg always digs out fascinating information about the smartphone market. Yesterday, some new charts from his workshop were released that show smartphone sales over the past three months. Long story short: Android is still leading, but iOS is making a comeback.

It's a funny thing. Android is the undisputed best-selling mobile operating system, but Android developers seem to suffer from an inferiority complex. Especially when their apps are compared to software that runs on that other platform. You know the one I mean. The highly polished, tightly controlled, immaculately curated, stylistically homogenous, Steve Jobs-inspired iOS platform. Who can compete with that, right? I mean...Jobs was a legend.

Google is addressing the Android development community's stylistic shortcomings with a new Web site. Android Design is an illustrated set of principles for Android 4 developers. Some of site's advice is a little cheesy – it suggests you you consider these goals when designing your app: “Enchant me,” “Simplify my life,” and “Make me amazing.” But as you delve deeper into the site you'll find real, tangible information that will be of great helpfulness in making your apps run and look better on Android.

In particular, the site does a good job of identifying new features of Android 4.x – Ice Cream Sandwich – and explaining how they should be used in apps. Some of Google's advice sheds light on innovative new interface widgets and how they can make apps better, and some is just good sense. But in both cases, the style guidelines serve as important reminders of how consistent style can improve the user experience of platforms and apps.

Bottom line: Android Design is more than just a good idea. It promises to be an essential resource for Android developers.

Web recommendation: IBM researchers have succeeded in storing a bit of information in just 12 atoms. It's unclear how long it will take this innovation to reach the field, if ever, but it's an astonishing achievement. You can read all about it here. J.D. says check it out.

J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. He wore no shoes during the composition of this post.

Frankly, we really think this whole affair is just silly. It's lawyers fighting lawyers, and not a drop of innovation or experimentation will come from any of it. It's just lawyers. All lawyers. No software developers will profit. No application designers will see a benefit from any of this. In fact, most folks involved in even a tangential way will find this ruling makes more work for them.

HTC, for example, is reworking its phones to circumvent the patent in question. There were four patents in total mentioned in the suit, but only one was found to be infringed by HTC. That patent? A patent on allowing phones to recognize a phone number.

Utter insanity. Ludicrous. This is a capability that a simple caller ID box can perform, and has been able to perform since the early 90's. In fact, you can buy home phones with this capability built in, but we don't see Apple suing any of those companies.

Software patent infringement cases are only brought by companies that have run out of innovations. It's as simple as that. With Steve Jobs dead, and its hottest new technology entirely gained from acquisition, these lawsuits around the globe could be seen as a death knell for Apple. Are they out of ideas? If you talk to their lawyers, they'd say Apple invented everything, and has many more ideas to come. Perhaps next year, Apple will patent a method for dialing a phone with only the thumb. Or how about a patent on allowing a cellular phone to make cellular phone calls? That'd be a good one too.

Seriously, this is just ridiculous and out of hand. Software patents are no more useful than a patent on a slogan. Copyright is sufficient to protect software from infringement. patents just ruin the entire space for everyone involved. No good can come of any of these lawsuits. Unless you're a lawyer, in which case these law suits will probably help you put in a second pool. Aren't we all so happy we can help those starving lawyers out?

Developers have been creating Kindle Fire compatible applications for quite some time -- any Android application that is compatible with Android Gingerbread (2.3.4) is Kindle Fire compatible. 

There are some differences, however. The dimensions of the Fire tablet (7 inch screen with a resolution of 1024 x 600)  and the native functionality. According to Amazon's developer site, the app cannot require "a gyroscope, camera, WAN module, Bluetooth, microphone, GPS or micro-SD to work." 

I also think the types of applications you can/should create are different. Tablet users are not like other mobile users -- Tablets are, in my opinion, purely for leisure, especially something like the Kindle Fire. 

What are your thoughts? Has this lit a fire under your Android tablet development? Or do you think it will just fizzle out after the holiday rush? 

Share your thoughts (or Tweets) with us!

Recent developments are demonstrating that our mobile phones are not as secure as they ought to be.

First, the Carrier IQ mess. This has been front-page material on a lot of news sites recently. Here's the story, in brief: A systems administrator from Connecticut named Trevor Eckhart has discovered an application that serves as an undocumented keylogger on more than 140 million mobile phones, even when they are sending SMS messages or browsing the web via HTTPS. Eckhard demonstrated the data-collecting behavior in a 17-minute YouTube video. The application comes from California Carrier IQ, which refers to its business as “mobile service intelligence.” Carrier IQ says it gives phone-service providers “a mission-critical tool to improve the quality of the network, understand device issues and ultimately improve the user experience.” Critics – including the Electronic Frontier Foundation and U.S. Senator Al Franken – say the software is a rootkit, and they are very concerned that the information Carrier IQ collects may be stored, transmitted, or yielded up to third parties (including law enforcement, with or without a subpoena). Apple says it will phase out use of Carrier IQ software. RIM has responded to reports that the software runs on BlackBerry phones with a denial. AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile install Carrier IQ software on phones they resell, while Verizon claims not to use it. If you're concerned about your phone, do a Web-search. This news is easy to find.

Second, researchers at North Carolina State University have published a report about security vulnerabilities they found in a range of Android-based phones. The problems aren't with the Android OS itself, but with utility applications that are frequently preloaded on customer handsets. The researchers found that these apps could serve as infection points for malware that could send SMS messages, sign users up for third-party SMS services, record phone calls, send text messages to premium numbers that charge for such calls, or factory-reset the system.

Third, vendors continue to find malware applications in the app stores. Due to the wild-west nature of the Android market, most of the malware has been found there. But a few apps have slipped into Apple's iPhone software store too. Vendors ban these apps from their Web sites as soon as they are reported, but new malware is quick to appear.

How serious is the malware threat? That depends on who you ask. Security-software vendor McAfee captured headlines when it issued a news release saying that Android-based malware was up 37 percent in the third quarter of 2011. The company was announcing the publication of its third-quarter “Threats Report,” which gives details of viruses and trojans detected during the past 90 days. Naturally, McAfee, which makes its money selling anti-malware applications, wants the threat to look serious. And the 37 percent rise does sound like a big deal...until you dig through the report and find that the figures are based on a rise from 60 infections detected during the quarter to 82. That's out of 75 million malware detections McAfee finds per year – 95 percent targeting Windows systems.

So the threat is small. But growing.

Compounding the problem is the lack of a coherent security strategy in the Android market, which is the fastest-growing part of the mobile industry. There are dozens of hardware vendors and service carriers, and they are probably unable to work together effectively to patch the security holes that threaten users. Makers of Windows-targeted malware-detection software are starting to pay attention to the Android platform, but early reviews suggest that their software isn't yet up-to-snuff.

In an amusing turn of events, Research in Motion, the maker of the BlackBerry, is offering security software that will run on iPhones and Android-based phones. The software, BlackBerry Mobile Fusion, will allow system administrators to create groups, update user profiles, roll out or update software, and recover lost devices. Whether this will lead to new business for RIM or destroy the uniqueness of BlackBerry's last remaining selling point remains to be seen.

Why does all this matter? Because where there are smart phones, there's software. Where there's a security risk, there's a need for tech-savvy personnel to craft and administer solutions. Where there's a new hardware platform, there's an opportunity. That's right, I'm talking to you. This is a career opportunity. In the face of downsizing and outsourcing, your cubicle may not be as secure as you think it is. The smartphone security market is in its infancy and it's growing. Food for thought.

Web recommendation: Version 11 of Microsoft's venerable Visual Studio software-development environment is currently in beta. If you work in a Microsoft shop, you will probably upgrade as a matter of course. But it's still worth knowing about the new features and how well they work. The most comprehensive review I've seen so far is this one, written by Peter Vogel for Visual Studio Magazine. J.D. says check it out.

J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. Boy, could he use a neck massage!

Source code for version 4.0 (actually version 4.0.1) of Android is now available for download from Google. Get the code here.

The latest release of the Android OS, code-named Ice Cream Sandwich, is intended to run on both smart phones and tablet computers. The first announced Android 4.0 device is the Galaxy Nexus smart phone from Samsung. The Ice Cream Sandwich source code available for download from Google assumes a Nexus target. Bloggers and new sites speculate that the Nexus will be released for retail sale on November 17, at least in Europe. Canadian telecom operators Bell and Virgin are expected to ship the Nexus in December, with Rogers and Telus following in January 2012. Rumor-mongers expect Verizon so ship the Nexus first in the U.S., probably by the end of November.

According to Google software engineer Jean-Baptiste Queru, who announced the availability of Android 4.0 source code, developers who download Ice Cream Sandwich code will receive the entire Android source code tree, which includes 3.x (Honeycomb) code. Google had not previously released Honeycomb source code.

For more information, check out the Android Open Source Project home page.

Web recommendation: Professor Orin S. Kerr of the George Washington University Law School attempts to put a stake through the heart of the U.S. Computer Fraud and Abuse Act in his recent testimony before the House of Representatives subcommittee on crime, terrorism, and homeland security. According to Kerr, the CFAA criminalizes the everyday actions of millions of innocent Americans who use the Internet in routine ways. “Any of them,” Kerr says, “could fast arrest and criminal prosecution.” A PDF file of Kerr's testimony is available here. J.D. say check it out.

J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. He doesn't much care for burek.

Still at Android Developer Conference, where Don Kellogg, director of telecom research for Nielsen. In his day job, he analyzes the information Nielsen gathers from its pool of research subjects, who have their bills scraped, answer surveys, and even install monitoring applications on their phones which anonymously record their activities and usage statistics.

"I get to play with all our cool research and share it with you," said Kellogg. His talk was a flurry of statistics and information on smartphone users, so we'll attempt to relay the interesting figures herein.

"The thing that's exciting about Android and the mobile ecosystem in general, is that one of the core things you have to compete on is how friendly are you to developers," said Kellogg.

Kellogg said the average smart phone user uses 38 applications in a given month. He also stated that, currently, 44% of Americans have smart phones. "The growth of smart phones is not a hockey stick graph. We're going to hit the 50% penetration rate somewhere between February and March of next year. Given the Apple launch of the iPhone 4GS, it may be closer to January," said Kellogg.

Kellogg went on to show off a day in the life of an average smart phone user. For that user, phone calls account for less than 3% of the overall usage time. 94.1% of the time, the device was not active. 5.9% of the time it is active. Users average 1:25:14 hours of use per day.

What are those users doing during that time? 40% of that usage time is spent on Facebook, either on the Web or on the native Facebook app. 28% of that time is spent gaming. Messaging takes up 8%, and Internet usage was 12%. Beyond that, 1% of time was spent on email, 7% on preloaded applications, and only 1% on third party applications.

The growth of smart phone usage and of mobile Internet usage has been a major trend for Kellogg to follow. He said that in Q2 of 2010, there were only 34 million mobile Internet users in the U.S. In Q2 2011, that number grew to 52 million users. In Q2 2010, only 27 million smart phone users downloaded applications, while in Q2 2011, that number was up to 44 million users. Perhaps the largest growth was in streaming media applications. I Q2 2010, 15 million users used streaming media on their smart phone. In Q2 2011, that number was up to 26 million users. Kellogg gave a nod to Pandora for this increase.

In the area of demographics, Kellogg showed that, by manufacturer, Motorola device users tended to be the most affluent and wealthy. He showed over 34% of Motorola Android owners were making over $100k per year. He added that Motrola devices are popular on Verizon's network, and that this skews those numbers higher, as Verizon customers tend to be wealthier than other mobile carrier users.

Perhaps the most interesting bit of information Kellogg intimated was the relative popularity of the various Android devices. He showed the HTC Evo 4G was the single most popular Android handset, both overall, and within the last quarter. The Motorola Droid X came in second overall, and the LG Optimus S placed third overall.

"You need to make sure you test on the Evo," aid Kellogg. "The other thing I'd point out is there are a lot of large format screen devices here. The Evo, the Droid X, and the Samsung Charge. Make sure if you're developing applications, you develop for a larger screen size."

He also showed that reviews make a big difference to users. "You cannot release an app that is not fully baked because people use reviews quite a bit. Make sure when you release your app that it's ready. 61% of folks say reviews are extremely or very important. It's OK to iterate and improve, but make sure it's ready," said Kellogg.

Then came the bad news. Unfortunately, the top ten applications in the Android app store account for 34% of all time spent with third party applications on Android devices. The next ten most popular apps equate 8%, the next ten another 8% and the final ten apps in the top 50 make up 2% of the overall app usage. The whole rest of the store eats up only 47% of all time.

Fortunately, the story is much the same on iOS: the top ten applications make up 45% of the overall app usage on that platform.

Kellogg, finally, explained how applications get upgraded. Most users said they upgraded from a free version to a paid for version because they wanted additional functionality. The least successful upgrade trick, however, was using a timed trial. When the time runs out on the trial version, under 25% of users upgraded. "Don't make your free app or your trial app too good. You don't want to make it expire, but you don't want to make it good enough so people wont buy the full version."

Kellogg blogs at Nielsen's site, and offers interesting info from time to time. His slides will be on the Android Developer Conference site shortly.

This keynote is titled Android Awesomeness, and is presented by Romain Guy, senior software engineer at Google, and Chet Haase, also senior software engineer at Google. They're starting out with a history lesson. Romain intimated that originally, each release of the Android OS was named after a robot, such as Bender. Copyright issues negated that, and the team moved to the sweeties theme.

Chet is showing slides that say there are now north of 500 million Android devices out there. Now, he's showing numbers that put Android apps in February 2011 at over 150,000. Today, however, that number is at over 300,000.

Chet: "if we took all of those poeplt hat had a new android device every single day and stacked them on top of each other, it would take only 764 days for that stack to reach the moon." Romain: "And this makes absolutely no sense what so ever." Chet adds that, today, it would only take 404 days to reach the moon."

On to Ice Cream Sandwich. Romain "Android 4.0 has everything that every previous release has. The platform, when there's a version 4, we won't have APIs that won't exist from one release to the other. If there's an API in the platform, it will stay there forever.

Romain is going over the improvements in Honeycomb. Better UI, USB host mode, new apps. Revamped Gmail app, added books and movie studio, and a redone Market.

Chet: "There were also new widgets in the platform with Honeycomb. YOu could take your gmail app and drop it on the home screen and read your email without opening the Gmail application. And there were a bunch of dev improvements. Fragments. The whole purpose of fragments was to create the ability for devs to write one source that could target multiple devices. You no longer have to have a phone app as well as a tablet app, you can have an app that can cofigure itself to run on both."

More info on Fragments is online. Chet now talking about the system bar, which enabled LightsOut mode for low visual profile, and rich notifications.

Romain: "Action Bar was also one of the biggest changes in Honeycomb. This is widely used by applications on the market. This replaces the hardware menu key. Instead, we put all the elements on screen. Renderscript was introduced. You can use it to render 3D on screen using the GPU, when you do processing with it, it will ultimately work on multiple cores. One fo the benefits of Renderscipt is the speed of the code, but it's easy to write.

Chet: Live wallpapers and the YouTube video wall, Books, and the carosel feature of that use Renderscript.

More on renderscript online here and here.

Chet: "Layers was part of what we did to make thigns faster on the device. New API for allowing you to cache rendering for quick animations. More info online here. Takes up a bit of memory so you don't want to use layers for everything. If all you're doing is copying that thing around or fading things in and out, it can make things faster.

There was supposedly a new animation framework in 3.x. The animation framework that existed prior... there were a series of classes, but if you wanted to do more than fade or rotate a view, it was tough. In 3.0 we introduced Andorid.animation that works on properties. You target an object and the properties you want to change, write start, and it handles that itself. In 3.1 we introduced a class to make it even easier called ViewPropertyAnimator wihch made it even easier.

Romain: "There was a lot more, but we won't go into details. There's a new clipboard API, now we have systemwide API to do it. We also introduced a number of widgets: date picker, number picker, stack views, calendar view. There was much more.

Let's take a look at Ice Cream Sandwich. Chet: "There are three overall changes to the platform. Overall UI, Apps themselves, and Innovations."

Now they are firing up a demo. Romain is talking about how happy he is the new Samsung Galaxy can be plugged into the projectors, rather than them having to use a camera on the screen to show off the demo to this audience.

The new lock screen now includes a camera link, so you can quickly take a picture without unlocking the phone. Romain: "We also have bookmarks which are synchronised. We can scroll vertically page by page through the applications. This used to be done in Renderscript. YOu can quickly go through your widgets without a long-press. We also improved folders. You can rename them with one tap. You can reorganize the content of your folders. ANd if you want to create a folder, it's extremely simple.

Chet: "Recent apps. We can pop up recent apps and see thumbnails." Romain: "This used to be a long press on the home button, but now we have an on-screen cue for it." Chet: "There's also a new paradigm of swiping to get rid of items. We can swipe an application away from these thumbnails. This can also be used to kill applications."

Chet: "The system bar on phones got split, as opposed to Honeycomb, where the buttons were on the left and the info on the right. Now that's split. We can pull down the shade and we can see the notifications waiting for us. We can swipe to get rid of these things, or we can close them all by tapping the X button.

Romain: "New music player. You can have controls in the notification, to stop songs or move to the next song in the notification bar." Chet: "Both camera and music controls you may want to access without diving into your phone, so music and camera controls can be used from the lock screen, so you don't have to unlock your phone to do that."

Romain: "The Web browser. There are many websites I go to on my phone and I hate it when they give me the mobile version of the Webiste. We have a feature here where you can request a desktop version of the Website. We have a better tabs UI so you can see up to 16 tabs.

You can syncronize your bookmarks with Chrome if you use that on your desktop.

Chet: "Calendar has gotten enhancements to make it easier to use. If you have a lot of events sometiems its hard to read your calendar. We have pinch zoom in Calendar now. you can also swipe easily to go through the days of the week."

Romain: "The swipe is becoming a universal gesture in the interface. Camera now detects faces to pull focus. We also have different modes, you just press the button and slowly swipe across the scene with your camera and you can create a panorama. We have a really nice video camera that can do 1080p. While recording the video you can tap the screen to capture a phone while recording. We have a bunch of visual effects we can apply to the videos. Like big eyes, big nose, or even replace the background of the video. These FXs are also available when you use video chat in Google Talk."

Romain: "You can select the part of the image you want to focus. When you take a picture you can jump directly to the gallery, and from there we have a new edit menu, where you can apply visual effects. You can make the shadows darker, change the brightness, you can apply fancy hipster effects. It's an nice tool, it's very easy."

Romain: "You can sort your photos by location, by time, put tags on faces, etc.

Chet: "Email got various little improvements. The swiping feature we can see again. The action bar allows you to switch between accounts. Now we have the navigation elements at the top, and the actual actions we can perform and the overflow menu is on the right.

Romain: "We already had speech to text, but it was very slow. Now we're trying to do that in realtime. (Romain is now dictating an email to the device, which is only partially succeeding." Chet: "it was written by French engineers."

Romain: "You can click the words and correct mistakes. We also have now a spell checker, so when there's a red underline of a word, you can correct it. We made the dictionary better, too.

Romain: "Gmail also improved the way threaded conversations work.

Romain: "Google Maps has not changed much but it looks awesome on this device. One of the new Labs feature, you can enable pre-cache map area, then all you do is go to the map, long press, and here you can click pre-cache. Downloads 10 miles around where you want to go, and it downloads the maps. I'm going to a conference and there won't be a signal there, so I can download the maps and not get lost."

Romain: "Swiping works in the Market." Chet: "Market morphed in the last year to offer more than just applications. It's an all encompassing market for all the content you might want to have on your device."

The phone they're using is the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, by the way.

Romain: "profile pictures in the contacts list are now much bigger and higher resolution." And now the A/V system has crashed, and we're waiting for the phone display to come back up.

Romain: "You can now reject a call, accept it, or reject it and send a text message to the person using a pre-canned answer, which you configure yourself. Also face unlock. Facial recognition, you don't have to do anything, you just turn your phone on and it unlocks with your face."

For developers, Chet: "We have lots of social stuff in the system. APIs for plugging into Google Plus. Enabled to do more sharing of contacts. Other new features: Social API, new Calendar API, Visual Voicemail, Android Beam, Wifi direct, Bluetooth Health Device Profile. You can now add events to a users calendar. There's ways to integrate directly into the built in voicemail system. Android beam uses NFC to tap two phones together to send what's on one phone to another: a web page or a game, for example."

Chet: "There's Wifi direct, so you can now connect devices directly so devices can talk to each other. Medical devices can be connected to via Bluetooth."

Chet: "The ability to set watermarks for data usage on your phone. If you went over usage you may not have realized it. You can set watermarks so you get a warning when the system reaches so much data. You can also set that per application."

Chet: "Not only is there a new API for users to interact with this, you can interact with it as well. Media: you can connect to the media layer at a very low level. New camera capabilities. Media effects on textures. Audio remote controls."

Chet: "UI Toolkit: lots of wonderful changes." Romain details the toolkit changes: "GridLayout. TextureView, it's a replacement for surface view, addresses some of the limitations of surface view. Hardware acceleration, stylus and mouse input. Pluggable dictionary and spell checker. The goal is to make complex layouts easier. You'd have a couple layouts, instead, you can jut have a single grid layout, there's no nesting.

Romain: "Accessibility API so you can write custom views. A pluggable text to speech engine. And hundreds of new APIs all over the place, we fixed a lot of bugs.

Romain's Blog. Chet's Blog.

And that's the end of the keynote! More talks will be blogged as the day goes on. Thanks for bearing with us as we frantically typed all of this in.

Back again for day three of the Android Developer Conference. The first talk of the day comes from Keith Clanton, technical director at WIMM Labs. His talk was entitled “Micro Apps for Wearbable Devices.” At the heart of this talk is the WIMM One, a wrist watch-sized device that can be interfaced with an Android phone.

The WIMM One is not only a window into your phone, it's also a micro app platform, said Clanton. That means developers can add WIMM functionality to their traditional Android applications. A WIMM One wearer could check his or her wrist to see the time, check a recent email, or read an SMS without having to pull out their phone.

Developing applications for a 1-inch screen is a very different problem, said Clanton. To that end, he detailed some of the best practices for UI design for such a small device.

Those UI guidelines state that developers should focus on interface gestures like swipes and taps, and endeavor to simplify features, minimize input and reduce hierarchy. “Simplicity and consistency are critical to a successful UI on a micro device. We try to use the paradigms as consistently as possible so they seem familiar to the users. This is a simplified view, that's why it's critical to simplify everything. We all want our applications to look cool, but keep it simple. Streamline features and if they don't make sense or don't work, remove them. Not only is the user wasting lots of time if they're having to do tedious input on the device, but we're also wearing down the battery. It's not efficient for the user or the device to try and accomplish too much on the device. We want to augment and compliment the functionality of existing devices not replace them. This isn't a replacement for a phone,” said Clanton.

Aside from these UI concerns, the WIMM One sticks closely to most of the existing Android APIs. The WIMM One APIs sit on the same layer as the Android API stack, and only a few of its features require special use.

One of the APIs on the WIMM One that does differ is the network API. Clanton said that a key concern for the WIMM One was battery life, which he said is now standing at around one day. To maintain this long battery life, strict controls over the device's radio transmitters and receivers was required, said Clanton.

“In order to have more than a day of battery life, we had to manage the radio. At a given interval, we turn on wifi. If a network is available, we notify each registered application, and each application connects to the Internet. Then the system tells these applications that the network is about to go down. We have to very carefully control any of the system resources to get that day of battery life, and one application that misbehaves can ruin it for everyone. Sometimes we may not grant the request to keep the network up for that application,” said Clanton.

The WIMM One begins shipping on November 9, tomorrow. The WIMM SDK can be downloaded now.

Still here at the Android Developer Conference in San Francisco. Currently, we're sitting in Moe Tanabian's talk, entitled “Save the Battery! App Design and Testing for Better Power Consumption.” Tanabian's focus has been on the software layer of Android devices, and how to determine power usage for running applications.

Tanabian spent a great deal of time explaining how to test Android device power consumption. He advocated the use of black and white screen redraws, and the rendering of static snow on the screen as a good way to measure the power consumption of a screen on a specific device. He also advocated downloading large files over HTTP to measure the impact of network usage on battery life. But there is one test that can engage every item in the device, said Tanabian.

“There's one application that engages everything in the box: camera, CPU, GPU, screen, WAN connectivity, etc., and that's video conferencing. If someone gave you two devices and said 'evaluate these devices,' the first thing you should think of is video conferencing,” said Tanabian.

Tanabian also detailed an equasion to describe how many power consumption tests should be performed to get reliable results. “If you want to measure power on your phone, you need to repeat the use case a number of times, and you need to measure the battery before the use cases and after, and somehow make that statistically interesting.”

Tanabian described his equation as “Total number of required power readings is equal to the duration time of the sample collected multiplied by the number of samples collected multiplied by the number of times the test was run.”

Tanabian said that, even with proper test procedures, there can be problems and inconsistencies through uncontrolled variables in these tests. “If you're trying to measure the power consumption for downloading and playing a YouTube video, YouTube changes their coding and streaming algorithm every day, and that can affect the results. If you want to make sure you're measuring power objectively, do it in a controlled environment.”

Tanabian said that each layer of the hardware stack must be tested independently to allow a developer to gather the proper readings on how much power their application consumes. Using the tests he described in his talk (Slides will be up soon), he said developers should test the screen, the GPS, the network, the audio, and the GPS systems independently. With a base reading for each system's standard power consumption, the developer can then isolate the exact amount of power his or her application is consuming during tests.

Tanabian also said UI's should always use darker colors because darker colors use less power. "Let's say you give a user 6, 7, 8 choices, the time it takes the user to figure out which of these controls they need to push or touch consumes power. The user is too confused. Decreasing the number of options from which the user can make a selection is a good idea."

Tanabian also said that cognitive latency created by interfaces should be limited. Thus, using split menus in a GUI can save battery power because users have less choices to scrutinise.