  During the last years, many improvements were made to the hardware capability
of mobile devices. As mobile software also became more interactive and data
processing intensive, the increased power demand could not be compensated by
the improvements on battery technology. Adaptive systems can help to balance
the demand of applications with the limitations of battery resources. For
effective systems, the influence of multimedia quality on power consumption of
the components of mobile devices needs to be better understood. In this paper,
we analyze the impact of video quality and wireless network type on the energy
consumption of a mobile device. We have found that the additional power
consumption is up to 38% higher when a movie is played over a WiFi network
instead from internal memory and 64% higher in case of a mobile network (3G).
We have also discovered that a higher movie quality not only affects the power
consumption of the CPU but also the power consumption of the WiFi unit by up to
58% and up to 72% respectively on mobile networks.
