Gadgetory

hey guys it's joe from pocketnow.com and one of the things I've noticed about newer androids is the battery icon isn't always indicative of the actual state of charge in the battery now I don't know why that is I've got some theories but what I'd like to show you is an app that we found that puts a widget on your home screen that shows you the real percentage and color codes it with the state of charge it's really nice a really good way to find out how much battery life you've got let's go look okay this is a one by one widget called quick battery it's available for free in the android marketplace and it's something that's a little bit more unique than a lot of battery apps and that is it doesn't really take much power self I mean it's kind of funny a lot of the apps that monitor battery state use a lot of power to run well this one doesn't and it's kind of neat not only that but it's got one other feature and that is that you can tap on it to launch a pre-configured app or the developer wants you to see here he's got this other app which is called quick settings that he'd like you to download and install and run it from there well I haven't done that but i have installed the app so let me go back to my home screen and we'll drop it on right here in an empty spot just like normal long press on the home screen hit widgets and we're going to scroll all the way down to quick battery right there tap on it and it asks you what style you wan has various different styles i like this alternative one activity to launch well you can program that to pretty much anything you want featured activities in here battery use etc and then other activities are apps and whatnot so you can literally tap on it to launch any app so if you just want to see what the battery life is but not take up the real estate with a non tappa Bulai con or something that's just going to take you to battery life or whatever you can do that too and then he's got a quick link here to download this quick settings app so we're going to say done and i'll move this right down here and you can see now i know a couple of you have complained the past that I've run videos with a relatively low state of charge on my battery and today don't get upset I remember and I'm trying to run all these videos with a full charge just for those few vocal minority out there that the like full batteries but today I ran it down deliberately and that so you can see I've got a twenty-nine percent charge on my battery now if you look up here in the status bar it looks like I've got half a battery so graphically about fifty percent versus just under thirty percent that's a fairly big difference if I've been running for say six eight hours then i would expect just by looking at this that I've got another six or eight hours left of the same type of usage that I've already put into it but obviously I don't now this indicator will drop off rather quickly the bottom half empties out faster than the top half it seems and I don't know if that's because it's not as important to run on a full state of charge as some might think so manufacturers are trying to make it look like there's more battery life or for some other reason i don't know maybe we're looking like an AT&T iPhone charge excuse me a antenna strength indicator where the algorithm might be off just a little bit but this is what's being reported back from the Android operating system itself so it's pretty not an accurate know if Android says that that's what it is that's what it is so looking at it right there it's pretty easy to see now what I need to do here obviously is charged up because I'm getting down into the lower percentile but I can take this move it around anywhere I want on this screen just like a one by one widget it's free it's lightweight it looks pretty good I'm really impressed with it and it's something that will help you augment that little not entirely correct indicator up in the bar now one last thing and that's this is the sprint samsung epic 4g the complaint about these battery charges and this indicator being off seem to be affecting all of the galaxy s phones and i haven't seen anything where Samsung is aware of the issue or even if they've knowledge the issue but if you've got one of the galaxy s phones whether that's the epic 4g a vibrant captivate an i 9000 or fascinate if you've got one of those and you want to get a little bit better battery indication download this it's really fast it's really inexpensive and you can't get much better than free from the android marketplace so take you right back there so you can see it it's called quick battery it's the app that we're featuring today and if you've got other apps that you think are indispensable I'd like to know go ahead and leave me comments give the video a thumbs up if you'd like to see more of these helpful widget type videos and as always make sure you subscribe to the pocket now video channel because if you don't you might miss out on some of this cool stuff so for pocket now i'm joe levi