Gadgetory

hey everybody it's joe from pocket now calm and I'm embarrassed to say but I ran out of battery life on my nexus one while I was at a very very important meeting so I know I've done a couple of articles on how you can prolong your battery life but today I thought what I do is show you some widgets some things that are built into the operating system and just some hints and tips on what you can do to monitor your battery life on your android phone specifically my nexus one come on let me show you okay let me start by saying that i am running cyanogenmod 5.0 point 6 on a t-mobile nexus one now that's android 2.1 for those of you who don't know but most of what I'm going to show you here is going to apply to the other versions of Android out there some of the widgets may not be available on Android 1.5 they may function a little bit differently and some of the screens maybe just a little bit different than what i'm going to show you here but in general the concepts are going to carry across so the first thing I'd like to show you is a modification of the stock battery indicator which you can see on the lockscreen the nexus one right up here now with this mod you'll see and let me come back in here to the main screen you'll see that it's got fifty four percent battery life remaining and it shows me that all the time that's a good indicator of how long I should expect my battery to last doesn't tell me in hours and minutes but I can know hey if it's been five hours that I've been running my phone as long as I continue to do the same sort of stuff I should expect to see about another five hours of life out of it which for me is a pretty good day I'll average anywhere between 8 and 15 hours of battery life on my phone depending on everything that I do and I have some tips and tricks that I showed you in a previous article you can go back and look for on pocketnow.com but let's jump right into some other things first off let's see what's getting this fifty-four percent number so I'm going to switch over here to landscape mode to make things a little bit easier for you to see and we'll go into settings once we're in settings we're going to go to about phone and you'll notice battery use right there so we're going to select that and look and see this tells me that I've been running for 21 minutes and 35 seconds since I last unplugged that was on the car dock in my car on the way home from work you'll notice that this has a bar chart of how my battery use has been split up eighty percent of that has been on display if you don't have your screen on you're going to get a lot more life out of your phone you might not be able to get as much use out of it from a usability perspective like surfing the web making phone calls or whatnot but if that display is off your notifications are still going to be coming in your email still be going to be coming in standby still going to be there you're going to be able to get and receive phone calls without any problem at all so when you're running low on battery turn off the screen leave it off as long as you can that's the biggest drain on this phone number two is the Android system took six percent cell standby five percent phone idol three percent Wi-Fi three percent launcher two percent so you can see the display is the energy hog here so this is a really good place to start and see hey where is my battery being sucked up what can I do to find a way to fine tune my usage maybe a just an app or widget so that it's not eating the battery quite as fast here with display really the only thing i could do is turn the screen off so let's go in and look at some widgets now let's go back home now we'll come back over here to a blank screen that i've prepared for you what i'm going to do is show you a couple of widgets one at a time we'll go into widgets first is the battery use widget all these widgets that i'm going to show you today are free from the android market I'm just go ahead and search for battery widgets this one that's pretty much that gives you a battery with a question mark you tap on it and it takes you right back to where we just work that's all it does it doesn't show you how much battery time is available how much runtime percentage nothing that's it long press on it it doesn't do anything let's just throw that away next let's go back to another widget here this is the battery widget this one I like a little bit better it's got a little picture of a silo a little battery look to it kind of nice it shows me the percentage that I have in the battery and a little tier two indicator showing me the various different levels and you can see the green here is about halfway down so I've used about half my battery nice graphical representation of my battery state not too bad I tap on it that lets me do a bunch of other stuff hit display it takes me to my sound and display settings come back here and do Wi-Fi on GPS on Bluetooth so it gives you a to tap interface to be able to turn off some of your power hungry apps out there if you will Wi-Fi GPS and Bluetooth I haven't found much problem with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth but if you've got some gps program that's just always on turn your gps off you'll get a lot more battery life out of it so all in all not a bad little widget that's about all it does it looks pretty nice there aren't any skins you're kind of stuck with what you see here so let's take a look at the next one next up is this widget called battery life tap on that I've actually gone in and configured this a little bit by default it's just got this nice big bubbly battery it looks more like a beaker full of green ooze than a battery but it's still kind of cool it tells me now that I've got fifty two percent which matches with my little status bar indicator and it says that my battery life is good you need some way to look at it and see am i doing good am i doing bad am I critical it's a nice indicator a feel-good word if you will tell you what your battery state is in words the customizations I've done is over here I've turned on the options to show me the internal battery temperature the current millivolts and what type of battery it is in this case the battery is at 82.4 degrees Celsius it's at 3796 millivolts and is lithium ion so that's pretty good go back in here to the settings and we can show the charging information show extended info we'll turn that off just so you can see it and we can also turn the temperature over to Celsius for those of you who are not in the United States of America coming back over here you can pick colors and all kinds of stuff to to configure how you want your battery status to show up here I kind of like the green so I'm just going to leave it with that when you turn off that extended information it does make that battery a little bit bigger or a little wider on the screen for you it still takes up two spots in either configuration so it's a 1 by 2 widget does a good job shows you what you need to know at a glance all around pretty good widget and for free you really can't beat it move on to the next one we're going to skip by all these others this one is called eoe battery I don't know what that means very simple widget in fact you can hardly see it here let me move it over here to another area it's kind of transparent which is nice you can see stuff through it but when showing you the percentage it's kind of hard to read they see if I can zoom in there for you depending on what your background is hard to tell what that number is is it too is it 52 is it 32 I don't know so kind of nice clean thin I like some of the others better so let's move on to those go back into widgets we're going to go back past AoE went right past that there's a OE I've got my other widgets in here and I think this is my last one called vis battery this battery is a graphical representation of a battery again instead of a green goo e liquid on the inside it's got this kind of yellowy doesn't come across very well in the video but it's much more yellow than the others were green tapping on it only lets you go directly to the battery info which shows you some different information whom what the other screen would give you now you can get to this through the operating system as well but I'm just going to go over it here because this would does expose this information a little bit faster than going all the way through the OS to get to it shows you the battery state is discharging the power plug is unplugged this is good for you to be able to diagnose if you've got a bad power cord for example or maybe if you've got a surge strip that's turned off and you're not getting any power even though it's plugged in that's good to tell you battery level it says is 52 of course that's percentage the battery scale is 100 I guess that could be changed to a thousand and then you could have 520 out of a thousand don't know why they have that but hey it's good to know the battery health is good so I'm wondering if on that other widget if good wasn't the state of charge but if it was the battery help itself I don't know how they get help out of this if there's a way the battery reports if it's having problems I've never seen a battery do that so I'm kind of iffy on if that's a good measure or not the battery voltage we can see now here is 3796 millivolts battery temperature this only shows Celsius which is why I kind of like that last widget because it converts it to Fahrenheit for me at 28 point zero degrees it is a lithium-ion versus an ikat or some other battery that I've never seen any of those in android phones but it's nice that you can tell what kind of battery it is and then the time since boot is two hours 53 minutes and Counting so let's go back you've also gotten a OneTouch access to the display information kind of nice because from here you can go in and turn it your see if I can find it turn your brightness down I use automatic brightness almost all of the time it seems to give me a little bit more battery life but you could come in and turn that off turn it back on or even manually adjust it all the way down to nothing to eat just a little bit more battery life out all the time because it won't be automatically turning it brighter and less bright as as the environment conditions dictate so kind of nice no skins for it I haven't seen any that offer skins but nice little shortcuts to get into some of the more deep information about the battery so that having been said you can see here I've got lots of other widgets on my screens sometime in the not-too-distant future i'm going to do some of those widgets i'll talk to you about those let you know why I chose them in hopes that my decisions might be able to save you a little frustration download time and maybe a little bit of money in the process but back to battery stuff I want to know about you what do you use than I didn't cover how do you make sure that you don't run out of battery life on if you can show me in a video what you like about the widgets or maybe there's an app that you like to use then gets you specific battery information I would love to see that go ahead and reply to this video with a video comment or if you don't want to go on camera go ahead and comment right up to me what you like what you don't like if you know what that battery status good means and how that information is achieved and if you've ever had a battery report anything other than good i want to know that too so go ahead and do that spread this via twitter facebook and of course go back to our website pocketnow.com and comment there we love when you participate the apps this be a little bit closer to our community and that's really what pocket now is all about is building community so for pocketnow.com and helping you find out how much juice is left in your Android battery i am jolie by