Notices

Surely you mean "BACKGROUND COLOUR"?

just filter it in your app if you want it to say 100 percent... Assume battery low will be 0 or something, and rescale whatever perentage device says after it comes off charger from 0-9x to 0-100..

Other dirty little secrets: 0 percent isn't 0 either. Depending on use patterns you'll see it jump very fast from some low level to "battery empty", and/or then it'll run for hours after "battery low", probably/perhaps locking the percentage at 5 or something..

It's not an entirely exact science.. A battery's capacity is rated according to standardized constant current or constant power discharge tests, after a standardized charge to a specific voltage. The discharge test is terminated at a specific voltage too. This gives you a capacity number.
However, if you redo the test at higher load, or lower load, you get yet another set of figures. If you let the battery sit unused for a year, you get different results again.

On my N810 where I can actually measure power draw, and integrate over time, I've found that the "useful" capacity of the battery, as in the actual power you can take out of it before reaching battery low, varies by about 200mAh depending on whether I just chat on IRC or if I listen to netradio..
IIRC when I measured power in and out of battery with the charger connected, took the sum and integrated, the charge level of the battery varied by about 7 percent. With the device sitting idle.
If I launched netradio, with the charger still connected, the charge level would drift even lower. It would, of course, still claim battery full itself despite battery in reality sitting at around 75 percent.

Another interesting observation, charging seems to slow down when I use it. And I mean that it draws less power from the charger, not that less power is put into battery because device is using more.. Kinda counterintuitive behaviour really..

what do you type to check battery level again?

This app is not showing battery drain dynamically? Or instantly?? For example, it was 80% when i plug in the wire to charge and it STILL show 80% throughout. When i unplug it...i have to wait a couple mins before it change the percentage?? It'll be nice if it shows change instantly EVEN when you're charging!!

The battery charge percentage isn't updated while charging. Generally it makes a big jump after you disconnect the charger, and I've also seen it adjusted upward a few minutes after charger has been disconnected.

LOL, No I meant what I typed
being in UK I would have preferred to spell it as "colour" but the code follows US english, so intentionally stuck to "color".

Fixed the "background" spelling though in the update 2-0-3

I reckon the developer could add this option in as a rough guide for people (could never be exact as one day you might not use the phone at all then the next day you are browsing the web/listening to music etc etc

In the options menu there could be a selector for what kind of usage you expect to be doing with medium usage providing say 10 hours of usage
Heavy Usage....= 10hours X 0.6 = 6 Hours Remaining
Medium Usage..=10hours X 1.0 = 10 Hours Remaining
Low Usage........=10hours X 1.4 = 14 Hours Remaining
Then there could be an estimated time remaining on battery dispayed depending on your usage.

If you get what i mean.
ps the above mentioned times remaining is NOT any official figures, i just used those to give an example.

Ive wanted to add this too earlier as its quite a useful thing to know.
The only reason I kept it out is that this info is available in the lshal command output(on tapping the widget) as remaining time and this widget does not execute lshal or any such command periodically to display the percentage instead there are QT wrappers available that send a signal to the app when the level changes. I rely on this to make the app less power hungry.

Alternatively I could change the behaviour of the app to poll the battery values using lshal and output info like percentage/voltage/remaining time/drain rate etc .
But need to a way to check how power hungry it would be as compared to the current implementation.

cheers

i have 2.0-3 now but tapping the widget doesn't do anything.

ps: Works great^^

since the desktop has to focus on many widgets you need to register your tap a bit longer on the widget so it registers as a tap.

what i do normally is double click it with my nail or stylus
alternative a slightly longer press would also do the trick