The main focus of Levis' talk was power management, the component of the OS he is overseeing. Cinder can prevent unintended battery drains, make sure an application can run for as long as users want, and even let users boost power levels, he said. It could also provide more detailed battery-life information on a handset's home screen.

Cinder will be able to know in detail how much energy each part of an application uses, and to budget power for that component. This should help to solve the problem of an unknown computing process continuously running in the background and draining a phone's battery. Rather than forcing the owner of the phone to notice the battery is being drained too quickly, find the application that's draining it and stop that process, Cinder would be able to control how much power the process uses, Levis said.

The OS could also dole out power based on how long a user typically wants to use an application. For example, if someone wanted to watch a movie on the device for two hours, Cinder could force the video player software to use power at a certain rate so it could survive for that period of time.