How Much Energy a Smartphone Uses in a Year (& Your Budget)

How Much Energy a Smartphone Uses in a Year (And What it Means for Your Budget)
Barry Fischer
October 2, 2012

The highly anticipated iPhone 5 is finally in millions of people's hands. Within three days of its launch, Apple had sold a record-breaking five million units. And within a year, analysts project that sales of the iPhone 5 will reach 170 million. The popularity of the new device got the team at Outlier thinking: how much juice does it take each year to charge a next-generation smartphone? And how does the energy consumption of smartphones compare to that of other consumer electronics?

Smartphones are displacing our use of clunkier, energy-intensive devices
When viewed in isolation, a massive increase in smartphone usage appears to drive higher overall energy consumption. But, the story is more complex than that: in fact, an increase in smartphone usage is likely to cause lower overall energy consumption…

So moving to tablets and smartphones for more and more computing usage is saving a huge amount of energy on the whole, and for each person, but they are going to need to seriously up the capability of tablets before people can totally switch off of laptops and desktops.

Like it though! :thumbsup: