i asked the dev if certain settings enabled would have a negative impact on battery life.; this was what he said:
http://drastic-ds.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=1128
We haven't done any actual experiments so it's hard to know for sure. These are just some educated guesses.
Fast forward: It will probably increase power consumption, the more it actually speeds things up. Lowering the fast-forward cap should therefore lower the impact.
Filters: Impact should be small but non-zero.
Multi-threaded: It depends on the game, but it's possible that this could actually increase battery life. Always remember though, this causes glitches in some games.
Sound: It shouldn't increase power consumption through more CPU utilization, but it may increase power consumption just by virtue of driving the speakers. So that should be proportionate to how high your volume is.
Microphone: I don't know about Android devices but on Pandora we could see a big measurable increase in power consumption when microphone is enabled. I have to ask how Lordus handles this but it only gets enabled if the game tries to use it, so it doesn't apply to everything there.
http://drastic-ds.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=1128