Monday, October 25, 2010

Looking for a great Battery Widget? Look no further!


One of the downsides to the Android OS is the fact you don't know the actual percentage of your battery remaining. Android only shows the battery icon on the top of the screen so when you're jamming out on Pandora or tweaking on PSX4droid, you won't know exactly how much of your battery is remaining. The best way to monitor your battery is to use a battery app or widget.

As you may know, there are dozens of battery apps and widgets found throughout the Android Market. I've tried many of them and none seemed to fit my requirements. I wanted an app that would have shortcuts to control wifi, gps, and bluetooth; three things I use quite frequently. Many of the apps I've found either were very large files (1mb+ for a battery app?!?!) or would drain my battery constantly (a bit counterintuitive..). Several of them also did not show percentages and some showed percentages in 5-10% increments.

Battery Widget by geekyouup includes those three shortcuts. This is not an app per se but rather a widget. This widget has a VERY small footprint so it won't use up our precious internal memory. The user interface is very simplistic as well. The battery indicator displays how much battery life is left using 1% increments so it is quite accurate. I've compared the accuracy with SystemPanel and there are no discrepancies. As far as I know, this widget does not have any noticeable effect on battery life. In fact, perhaps this widget can indeed help you save battery life by helping you shut off bluetooth, gps, and wifi when you're not using it. It's also quite popular since it's been around since the G1 days with hundreds of thousands of downloads. The QR code is below.



I just want it to be known this is NOT an app so don't go clicking on it in your apps window or getting frustrated it's not working. This is a widget so you need to long press your homescreen and go to "widgets" section then find Battery Widget to add it. 

QR Code for Battery Widget







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