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Help Better Battery Indicator Idea

Xenon

Well-Known Member
Aug 30, 2009
243
3
Croatia
I've come up with an idea for a battery status indicator
application. On my old Windows Mobile phone I had an application
(abcPowerMeter) which could show the current power consumption
of the phone. Like this:

powerscreenshot_185.png



If we can get this on the Galaxy, then it can be coupled with
the existing battery status information to give a pretty good
estimate of how long the battery is going to last under
current load
.

Instead of showing a notoriously unreliable and counterintuitive
green bar the phone would show something like this in the tray:

[150mA:7h]

This would mean that the current consumption is 150 mA and that
if it continues that way the battery is going to last for another 7h.
The hour figure is calculated from the battery status at the moment
and power consumption at the moment.

This would be tremendously useful:

- it would be relatively accurate
- it would give you something you intuitively understand, an hour figure
- it would allow you to plan ahead
- it would allow you to adjust, say, you could turn off some apps and
observe a jump from 1h to 3h in estimated time until outage (TUO)
- it would be less annoying as you could understand what is going on

By clicking on the icon you would get more details. Perhaps a
graph like above. I've also been thinking about a visual analogy that
would depict both rate of change and current status in an intuitive
way, but so far I don't have anything good.

Anyway, what do you think about this TUO meter? Is some kind
soul up to the task of writing it? I would gladly pay $10 to
have an application like this. I'm sick and tired of staring into the
battery level icon and not getting any useful information from it.
 
A note a about that random screenshot I pulled of the internet. 450 mA is not
an unusual figure. When you use WiFi and surf the Web, or have GPS on, 450 mA
can be drawn without problem. At that rate, the battery, which is 1500 mAh, will
last only about 3.3 hours (1500mAh/450mA=3.3h).
 
Upvote 0
I started work an a battery monitoring app a wee while back, as the ones currently on the market didn't have the functionality I wanted. I was looking for something that would :-
Alert me if the battery discharge rate whilst in standby mode was too high.
Display a graph showing battery level AND also indicate the mode the phone was in at the time (i.e. awake, standby, charging, etc)
Automatically shut the phone down when in standby, and the battery level was getting low.
If I ever get around to finishing it, I might try to add this feature...

device3.pngdevice2.pngdevice1.png
 
Upvote 0
I started work an a battery monitoring app a wee while back, as the ones currently on the market didn't have the functionality I wanted. I was looking for something that would :-
Alert me if the battery discharge rate whilst in standby mode was too high.
Display a graph showing battery level AND also indicate the mode the phone was in at the time (i.e. awake, standby, charging, etc)
Automatically shut the phone down when in standby, and the battery level was getting low.
If I ever get around to finishing it, I might try to add this feature...

View attachment 2144View attachment 2143View attachment 2142
If you need beta testers count on me!
 
Upvote 0
Check out the gnome-power-manager source. Not only does it keep all these statistics, but it also builds up a history of what information it received from the hardware, vs what actually happened. Using this, it can apply correction factors so that the time remaining is actually accurate.

The code has progressed significantly from this point, but here are the original ideas:
gnome-power-manager time remaining profile code Technical Blog of Richard Hughes
 
Upvote 0

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