Battery Status: Live Tile For Battery Percentage & History [WP7 Homebrew]
Since Nodo, Windows Phone 7 users have looked for ways to view the exact remaining battery percentage of their devices. Before Mango, that was only possible via the Diagnostics Menu, but WP7’s fruity update brought that functionality to the OS and now you can view the battery status in the battery saver menu in Settings. However, if you’re still looking for something more, try Battery Status, a homebrew app available for all unlocked Mango devices. It can be a little annoying having to go deep into the Settings menu just to see the remaining battery of your phone, and it is not as convenient as being able to see the percentage on your Start screen. This app shows the current and past battery status of your device and comes with live tile support.
Battery Status saves you the trouble of going to the Settings menu and navigating all the way to the bottom of Battery Saver mode to see the remaining battery percentage. Once you have installed the homebrew, pin it to your start screen and the live tile will show the charging status of your device as well as percentage of remaining battery life. The live tile is double-sided, as is the case with most Mango apps these days.
If you think this is all you can do with Battery Status, think again. Another really useful feature of the app is that it displays a graph of your device’s charging and discharging history. By default, the app only displays history of the present day, but you can also view battery history for any of the past few days. The live tile is a bit slow, and updates every 30 minutes, but this isn’t much of an issue as 30 minutes isn’t too large a timespan in terms of battery discharge. In the app’s options, you can turn battery log on and off and also set whether you want the live tile to update automatically or not.
To download the Homebrew or learn more about it, head over to the source link.
[via XDA-Developers]
Update: The app now works with developer unlocked devices, and does not require interop unlock. In addition to support for several languages, the developer has added a process viewer too that helps you see the battery consumption of distinct tasks. You can view graph details as well, and to do that just tap and hold your finger over the chart.
Such a shame no API exists (that I know of) to enable this to work with locked phones. Come on MS, get your acts together! 🙂