I'm currently using Auto Disconnect to save my battery life. Works great, but all the widgets etc. seem to be living in their own sandbox, and making data queries based on their configuration. If you have many applications doing constant queries at random times, you don't get the maximum benefit from Auto Disconnect.

How about having a scheduler, which would allow to group data updates? Applications could plug in to some pre-defined update cycle, and content with similar update needs would be updated within that cycle. How much would battery life benefit from something like this? I guess nothing spectacular, but still some progress.

I discussed this a bit with a friend of mine, and he assumed that Android has this kind of feature?