The purpose of this paper is to study the overall savings provided by the utilization of cell breathing in a cellular network taking into account not only the attainable savings in the radio access network (RAN) but also the consequences in the mobile phone. First, we briefly describe some cell breathing algorithms found in literature. None of the references have taken into account so far the impact of the cell-breathing technique on the mobile phone energy consumption. We present a system model that takes into account the radio access network and mobile phone consumptions. Then, we propose a distributed BSbased cell breathing algorithm that tackles the trade-off between the energy consumed by both the RAN and the mobile devices. Finally, simulation results of the performance are provided for the different state-of-the-art algorithms and our proposal, which permits us to identify the implications of such mechanisms in the overall consumed energy and user perception.