Keep close tabs on your Android battery with a widget
by Joe Pawlikowski on July 19, 2011
This is not a picture of my desktop, but mine down does contain this nifty circle you see in the bottom left corner. What is it, you might be wondering? It’s a simple widget that keeps accurate tabs on your battery life. See, the battery gauge in the notification bar is nice and all, but it’s not terribly accurate. It changes colors at certain intervals, but by the time you reach the 30 percent mark, it might be too late. This widget gives you the percentage of your battery remaining, so there is no mistake. Now that I’ve installed it, I know exactly when I need to charge my phone. While the widget is as simple as it gets, there are some customization points. Specifically, this means the size of the widget. You can go 1×1, which probably works best for most smartphone users. But, depending on your screen setup you can also go 2×1, 1×2, 2×2, 3×3, or 4×4. I’m not quite sure why you’d need 4×4, but hey, some people need the reminder front and center. The app is, of course, free, and you can
get Circle Battery Widget at the Market.
About the Author
Joe Pawlikowski is the Senior Editor at MobileMoo.com and has been covering the mobile industry full time since 2007. When he's not writing about the tech scene, he can be found discussing his personal love - baseball (and more specifically the New York Yankees) as well as writing on his personal blog.
3 comments… read them below or add one
Pretty cool app. I use Bat Stat which not only gives me how much is left, but also what temperature the battery is running at. It also shows the current voltage as well.
It’s also available at the market at http://bit.ly/rnTRzr.
I use Battery Indicator. It sits in the notification bar and has tons of features (from the description on the market):
• Fully configurable green, amber, red, and black icons
• Estimated charge / discharge time left
• Battery logging. You can log the battery state (charge, status, voltage, temperature) and browse the logs on the phone or export to CSV.
• Manually or automatically disable / reenable device lock screen / lockscreen / keyguard
• Alarms (full, charge above X, charge below X, temperature above X, or health failure)
• Themes for main window
• Lots of configurability; most features are optional
• Very lightweight (please email me if you think otherwise, and I’ll help you figure out what’s wrong — I promise this app will not drain your battery.)
• Open source
https://market.android.com/developer?pub=Darshan+Computing,+LLC
Cool app! You made this??