Well, the clock, cellular signal, and battery icons functions similarly (in fact, almost the same as I understand it) as the other status applets. They just have a different entry in the /etc/hildon-desktop/status-menu.plugins file.
Namely: instead of having X-Status-Area-Position=[#] they have X-Status-Area-Permanent-Item=Clock [for the clock] and X-Status-Area-Permanent-Item=Special-Item-[#] for battery (# = 1) and cell signal bars (# = 0)
If you do explore this avenue and see how it works, I would appreciate it if you either included a settings option to decide what icon size to use, or at least make a separate copy in the repos. This way users who like the smaller one can keep it. (I don't need this, so I'm not using either, but I can imagine others might prefer the smaller one, to any bigger one you may possibly figure out how to implement.)
