When we tried to measure the power consumption on mobile device using Trepn, we found an interesting phenomena. We measured the power consumption for the same app at different battery level. The results showed that the power consumption tested at high battery level (for example 100%) is lower than the power consumption tested at low battery level (for example 60%). In the two test, we used the same app to do the completely same thing. But we got different power consumption at different battery level.
The following is the results tested on Hongmi2 device:
Low Battery Level Test:
Battery Remaining (%) 54.68888
Power [uW] 1778990
Duration : 23 min 26 sec
High Battery Level Test:
Battery Remaining [%] 96.47673156
Power [uW] 893661.1763
Duration : 24 min 40 sec
So, my question is : Is this power consumption normal? Is this phennomena the device's natural property?
I don't know this device, but most of the smartphones over the past few years DO NOT report accurate power. Some only report power data every 30 seconds, which makes power averages useless in most cases.
Other devices don't report accurate power, so we estimate the power (and display an asterisk when we do so.) This data used to be fairly accurate BEFORE Google started blocking GPU and CPU load stats on Android 7.0 and beyond. So this is an issue with all newer devices.
Qualcomm goes to great lengths to ensure that our battery fuel gauge software is accurate at all battery levels. This is not the case with some other OEMs (like MTK).
If you have a device that reports accurate power like a Nexus 6 or 7 and are NOT running Android 7.0 or later, you should not see any difference in accuracy at different battery levels.
-Rick