A research on smartphone energy consumption by ECE Graduate Student Abhinav Pathak, Prof. Y. Charlie Hu, and collaborator at Microsoft Research to be published in the Eurosys 2012 Conference in April titled "Where is the energy spent inside my app? Fine Grained Energy Accounting on Smartphones with Eprof" has quickly gone the media rounds, appearing in over 100 news media all over the world including Time, BBC News, Wall Street Journal, Nasdaq, and MacWorld.

The research team made the discovery after developing software to analyze apps' energy usage. When they looked at popular apps such as Angry Birds, Free Chess and NYTimes, they found that only 10 to 30 percent of the energy was spent powering the app's core function. The rest was consumed in user tracking, downloading ads, and uploading user information.

More information on the coverage of this research can be found at:

NewScientist Tech

Time

BBC News