[skybrian]

The intelligent way to reduce power consumption for a radio is to not leave it on all the time. Instead you batch up requests and do them all at once. For example, a phone OS has a special push notification system to so that status updates from different apps will be delivered to the phone in the same radio cycle.

This is fundamentally different from a world where you assume always-on connectivity. It's more like the old pre-Internet days where email and Usenet were stored and forwarded.

If you have a compute task to accomplish on a phone, there's a tradeoff whether doing an RPC versus computing it locally would use less power and have less latency. As phone CPU's get faster it becomes more feasible to do compute-only tasks locally. This also increases availability.

So I'd argue that the trend is more towards offline computing and data synchronization protocols, not always-connected computing.