Dealing with large volume of data transfers over wireless networks is a challenge to address by both the research community and the communications industry. To solve the problem by adjusting the cellular network settings at the operator end only does not solve the problem entirely. The end user battery life time has to be considered as part of a holistic solution. This paper contributes towards ending the holistic approaches by clarifying the end user side of the equation using real measurements on a wireless module, thus isolating the energy footprint of cellular communication from the general battery drain in the device. The insights of the paper, are of two sorts. First, we have confirmed earlier knowledge on the importance of the channel states and the timers for the end user device energy consumption, by actually doing physical measurements. Thus, we can now motivate that more work on adaptation middleware on the user device end is worthwhile. We have done this study both using synthetic workloads and real applications (commonly used by smart phones and tablets).