Network errors such as packet losses consume large amounts of energy. We analyzed the reason for this through measurements using the latest smartphones and full-system simulation. We found that on packet losses the smartphones maintain high frequencies for CPU without doing useful work. To address this problem, we propose a method for reducing the energy consumption by lowering the performance level by exploiting a dynamic voltage and frequency scaling mechanism when long network delays are expected. According to our experiments, our method reduces the total energy consumption of web browsing on two different smartphones by up to 10.0% and 11.5%, respectively.