From the perspective of mobile users, the most considerable experiences are service delay and battery lifetime, both of which are closely related to the user state transition mechanism adopted in most mobile wireless systems. In this paper, the user state transition mechanism with more than simple two states (active/idle or on/off states) is modeled through Markov chain. Then, its performance is numerically analyzed with respect to the energy consumption and the activation delay by considering the bursty traffic attributes of mobile web services. As a result, we derive the energy–delay tradeoff curves, which show an achievable performance bound of the user state transition mechanism. The derived energy–delay tradeoff curve provides a guideline for network operators to suitably apply the user state transition mechanism so as to minimize the energy consumption of a mobile node while guaranteeing the delay requirement of the service.