How power hungry is communication support?

Anecdotally, most people know that their laptop batteries drain much sooner if wireless is enabled. But how power hungry is radio communication? I got a sense from an aside made by the CEO of Potenco who spoke at the I2V workshop (I attended this after the IDEAS competition).

Potenco has invented a portable power generator - you pull on a string and generate electricity. 1 minute of pulling is good for:

• 25 minutes of talk time on a cell phone
• 230 minutes of playing on an iPod
• 45 minutes of Nintendo gaming

Obviously, this is not totally scientific - what kind of cell phone is it; how strongly was the string pulled etc make a big difference. And of course, cell phone connectivity and WiFi are different things.

But at a gross level, a cell phone could be thought of as ipod playing + connecting to the cell tower. Just this connection decreases battery life by nearly 90%! Even intensive graphics engines last twice as long as pure communications equipment!