Overview
Nokia has recognised that users of smartphones would like to have better tools for monitoring their battery usage. It can be difficult to understand which applications are draining the battery and how the usage of the device will impact operating times. To increase this understanding Nokia Battery Monitor will be published for Symbian. It will be available soon in Ovi Store for free download.

Today, the remaining energy of Nokia mobile devices is displayed with battery bars in the top right corner of the screen. Granularity of this information is limited and it is difficult to estimate the actual remaining usage time based on this. Charging is indicated only with scrolling battery bars without any estimate of remaining charging time or the level of charge in the battery. Nokia Battery Monitor will fill these gaps by providing more detailed estimates for remaining battery capacity, various activities usage time and charging time. 

Features
Nokia Battery Monitor consists of a home screen widget (Figure 1) and a full screen application (Figure 2). The widget is used for visualization of remaining battery capacity and activity estimates. The full screen application provides more details and statistics of energy usage.
Remaining battery capacity is visualized with a large high resolution battery bar and also shown in percentages. Remaining usage time estimates are provided for voice call, web browsing, music playback and the overall device usage. Remaining charging time of the battery is estimated when the charger is connected. The usage statistics include distribution of overall and daily energy consumption of different applications.

Figure 1: Nokia Battery Monitor home screen widget

Figure 1 shows example views of Nokia Battery Monitor home screen widget. The view on the left shows the remaining usage time for voice calls with the remaining battery capacity. The view on the right shows the remaining charging time until the battery is full.

Figure 2: Nokia Battery Monitor full screen mode

Figure
2 shows the full screen application view of Nokia Battery Monitor. The
application consists of three tabs. ‘Estimates’ -view shows a summary of
activity estimates and remaining battery capacity. ‘Statistics’ -view
shows the distribution of overall and daily energy consumption. ‘Info’
-view provides instructions and other general information about the
application.

Coming soon
More details will be published in blog post part 2/2 when Nokia Battery Monitor is available for download in Ovi Store.

Nokia Battery Monitor has been developed in collaboration between
Nokia and VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland. We would really like
to hear what you think about it. Please send your feedback to: batterymonitor@nokia.com