As you may or may not know, Google has a knack for focusing on one particular "project" during the development of each major Android release.
Jelly Bean had Project Butter, an initiative to improve the overall speed and performance of the mobile operating system through smoother animations. KitKat brought us Project Svelte which optimized the installation to run on just 512MB of RAM for entry-level hardware.
In Android L, the search-and-everything-else giant is focusing its attention on improved battery life through Project Volta. An entire session was spent on the subject during Google's recent I/O conference but how well does it actually work at this stage in the development process?
To answer that question, Ars Technica recently put Android L's Project Volta to the test. So how did it fare? According to the test results, pretty damn good actually.
In their Wi-Fi browsing test, Android L Developer Preview lasted 36 percent longer than Android 4.4 KitKat - good for about two additional hours of uptime. Testing was performed on what the article describes as a beat-up, daily-driver phone and as such, the final numbers aren't necessarily indicative of what you might get with a shiny new device.
And since this is a developer preview of the OS, it's safe to assume that Google may squeeze even more performance out of Project Volta before the final consumer version arrives this fall.
Either way, the results are encouraging to say the least.