In a typical handheld/portable embedded system device Battery life is a major concern in design of H/W, S/W and the features the device can support. From the Software progra
1800 INFORMATION said, avoid polling; subscribe to events and wait for them to happenAnd read some other guidelines. ;)
Recently a series of posts called "Optimizing Software Applications for Power", started appearing on Intel Software Blogs. May be of some use for x86 developers.