How much power does a cellphone use?

80 barrels of oil = 3712 gallons of gas = 137,344 kilowatt hours. Per day? I call shenanigans on that statistic.

Information http://enduse.lbl.gov/Projects/InfoTech.html.

Perfect link, tellurian ... from that site, we get http://enduse.lbl.gov/Info/Stories/OffEquip/oethestory.html which concludes that things aren't terribly bad now, and they'll get significantly better over time: Minicomputer and mainframe unit energy consumptions have been falling for years, as more and more of the functions previously handled by peripherals are integrated into fewer and fewer chips. Heat is an especially important issue in these machines (it reduces equipment lifetime), and the manufacturers have for this reason pushed to reduce energy use. ... While energy use for this equipment has grown rapidly in recent years, this growth is likely to slow in the next decade because the US commercial sector market is becoming saturated (especially for PC CPUs and monitors).

Wait, I'm confused. Are you asking how much energy it takes to use a cell-phone, in aggregate? As in, including the power dissipated in the phone, all the cell towers, and all the networking infrastructure needed for that call to get from point A to point B? Or are you just asking about the power consumption of a cell phone in isolation? It's really not clear what you're asking because you mention datacenters in the same question. Power consumption of a cell phone is not exactly a trivial thing to calculate. They are designed to be as miserly as possible, to make the battery charge last as long as possible. This means that they continuously regulate the amount of RF power they transmit so that at any given time they are transmitting only the smallest amount of power necessary for the signal to make it to the tower. And it should be obvious from the specifications that a cell phone in standby mode takes vastly less power than one that is actually making a call. So you would really have to fully specify what you mean here. Alternatively, maybe you're just asking how much power power is stored in one charge of a typical cell phone's battery. That might be easier to calculate. Just about all batteries will have a capacity specified in Ampere-Hours (or milliamp-hours, same thing.) If you know the output voltage (and you're willing to make the simplifying assumption that the output voltage doesn't vary, which is not really true) then you can just multiply amp-hours times volts to get watt-hours which is directly comparable with other figures.

The full numbers are at the bottom of http://www.sun.com/servers/coolthreads/t1000/: "Did you know? "The average corporate data center burns through 80 barrels of oil per day. Calculation based on a data center size of 2 MW that burns an equivalent of 3.3 barrels of oil per hour." So they're saying 1 barrel is 1,650 KWh, or about the same as frogan used. And 2MW is a huge data center. Taking the numbers from http://www.ipodbattery.com/ an iPod battery holds 3.5 Wh, so that's half a million charges per barrel, or allowing for the inefficiency of charging, 250-400,000. Cellphone batteries are usually a bit bigger than iPod batteries, but you get the idea.

You could get a http://www.cyberguys.com/templates/searchdetail.asp?T1=112+0240 and find out. I've actually wanted one of these for a while.

I think the original poster was actually trying to find out how much power is consumed by the iTunes Music Store, per customer or per customer-downloaded song. You could simply take the total power usage of the Apple server farm, and then divide by however many billion songs have been downloaded so far. That gives you the power usage per song. Then multiply by the number of songs you have bought or intend to buy. The math gets a bit harder if you download from P2P networks. You could compute a rough number by taking the average power usage of a PC, multiplying it by the number of nodes in the P2P net of your choice (on average), then divide by the total number of songs hosted. That gives you power per P2P hosted song. Then multiply by the number of songs you get from P2P. Of course, this ignores the telecom infrastructure needed for the P2P network. You have cable & DSL modems, midrange switches, edge routers, core routers, core switches, etc. as well as long haul SONNET gear to consider as well. I suspect that iTMS songs have a much smaller energy footprint than P2P networks because there is vastly more redundancy in the p2p nets. Apple probably has at least one backup farm, but the most popular songs on P2P networks will be duplicated on many, perhaps tens of thousands to millions of, PCs.

I'm trying to understand the invisible power consumption associated with say, an iPod, or cellphone. Eg if there are a certain number of iPods out there and Apple's iTunes server consumes X Kilowatts of power, what is the average user's share of that power overhead? Likewise, say a phone: E.g. If T-Mobile has a given number of subscribers and servers what is the total actual energy footprint associated with owning a cellphone per year?

I think the original poster was actually trying to find out how much power is consumed by the iTunes Music Store, per customer or per customer-downloaded song. Even thought the iTunes music store is certain to use a ton of electricity, comparitively, it's quite a bargain. Imagine the amount of energy that would instead be required to make those millions and millions of little plastic and metal foil discs and then ship them to all corners of the world....