The current proliferation of mobile systems, such as smart phones, PDA and tablets, has led to their adoption as the primary computing platforms for many users. This trend suggests that designers will continue to aim towards the convergence of functionality on a single mobile device. However, this convergence penalizes the mobile system in computational resources such as processor speed, memory consumption, disk capacity, as well as in weight, size, ergonomics and the user’s most important component, battery life. Therefore, this current trend aims towards the efficient and effective use of its hardware and software components. Hence, energy consumption and response time are major concerns when executing complex algorithms on mobile devices because they require significant resources to solve intricate problems. Current cloud computing environments for performing complex and data intensive computation remotely are likely to be an excellent solution for off-loading computation and data processing from mobile devices restricted by reduced resources. In cloud computing, virtualization enables a logical abstraction of physical components in a scalable manner that can overcome the physical constraint of resources. This optimizes IT infrastructure and makes cloud computing a worthy cost effective solution. The intent of this thesis is to determine the types of applications that are better suited to be off-loaded to the cloud from mobile devices. To this end, this thesis quantitatively and qualitatively compares the performance of executing two different kinds of workloads locally on two different mobile devices and remotely on two different cloud computing providers. The results of this thesis are expected to provide valuable insight to developers and architects of mobile applications by providing information on the applications that can be performed remotely in order to save energy and get better response times while remaining transparent to users.