AMPlab

Carat promises to polish your smartphone's battery life

Tired of the same old battery life drain game? A team of engineers from UC Berkeley's Algorithms, Machines, and People Laboratory has developed an app called Carat that "provides a great deal of information about how energy is being used on your phone," according to the official description.

So how does Carat work? The app runs in the background and monitors the energy consumption of various apps and processes on your smartphone, then sends that information to a data analytics Spark application running on Amazon Web Services. Usual suspects include data-hungry apps, an outdated operating system, Wi-Fi, and GPS. … Read more