Earlier, I have covered a hack to display battery life as percentage in the status bar (if you’re using iPhone 3GS, this feature is built-in). In terms of accuracy, it’s much better than the original battery icon. But it doesn’t tell you much about the battery life.
Say, the battery meter shows 60% of remaining battery. What does this mean to you? Not too much. The only thing it tells is your iPhone already used up 40% of battery. However, this is not enough. What you probably want to know is how much time left for doing a particular task at the current battery level. Say,
- How much talk time is left?
- Or how much time left for surfing the Internet over Wifi?
- Or can I watch a three-hours long movie with the remaining battery?
The built-in battery meter does not show you these information. Some iPhone developers know that and create several iPhone applications that helps you monitor the iPhone battery. One of them I particularly like is myBatteryLife.
myBatteryLife is a very simple application with a nice user interface. After you launch it, you’ll see a large battery icon and the remaining battery in percentage. What’s more is it translates the remaining battery life into useful information including:
- How much talk time is available
- How much time left for Internet browsing over 3G
- How much time left for Internet browsing over Wifi
- How much time left for video playback
- How much time left for audio playback
From my test, the time estimate is very close to the actual time usage. I highly recommend you check out this app at App Store if you need to keep track the iPhone battery life. myBatteryLife is a paid app which costs US$0.99. To download myBatteryLife, you can click this direct iTunes link.
Other than myBatteryLife, there are several iPhone applications which offer the similar feature. You can also try out Battery Go!, Battery Juice or Battery Level.
Note: As myBatteryLife developers claimed, the application can only update battery life in 5% interval, which is due to the limitation of iPhone software.
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{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
What about an app that can “deactivate” any of the non-essential items that drain most of the life out of these precious machines. For example An app that automatically shuts down open apps and running in the backgrds, turn off locational services, turns of the push mail, wifi (cancel wifi search screen too), Understand.
That’s interesting to see an app to automatically turn off unwanted features for battery saving. But from what I know, there is no such app yet. At the mean time, you’ll need to turn off these features manually.
Indeed, it would be nice. With such OS under the hood and with the genius out there; it should be just a matter of time.
But something triggered a question mark when i look at the above app screen shot. It’s showing 27% on the top right of the little battery icon, and 25% on the app itself.
Is it because it’s just a home made screen shot, or the battery % hack or the app?