One of the little gems that you can find on the iPhone 3G S is an option to show your battery life in a percentage as opposed to the standard battery indicator. Personally, this is one that I am happy to see, I have previously had to jailbreak in order to enjoy this, but now it is official.
Sadly though, and for reasons I cannot guess — this option is only available in the iPhone 3G S. I am also unsure as to why this is not turned on by default, however once you know where to go, it is simple enough to enable.
Anyway, to enable the battery percentage indicator, go to:
Settings -> General -> Usage
Then once you are in the Usage section, simply move the slider for “Battery Percentage” to the On position.
All set, you should then see your battery life in a percentage form, unfortunately this does not help the overall battery life in any way, but for some (myself included) it is a nicer way to view your current battery status.
June 22nd, 2009 at 6:26 am
Why this is not on the 3G is beyond me!
June 22nd, 2009 at 7:38 am
what carrier is fckd? lol
June 22nd, 2009 at 8:27 am
Not on the 3G and off on the S because it takes CPU horsepower to constantly display accurate %
June 22nd, 2009 at 9:36 am
I have it on my 3G on 3.0, but no way of turning it on and off.
June 22nd, 2009 at 12:02 pm
Craig, That is interesting, did you enable it before you updated to 3.0 with a jailbreak of any sort. Sometimes certain settings will carry over. I have it on my 3G as well as a custom carrier name that I could not remove, change or edit until I re-jailbroke.
Aside from that I am not sure how else that would have shown up on a 3G. Cool though. I prefer the percentage.
June 22nd, 2009 at 12:56 pm
I don’t know why everyone wants the percentage display so much. There’s no way the battery level circuitry is that accurate. It’s like buying a cheap bathroom scale at Kmart that shows your weight to five decimal places. “I weigh 182.47632 pounds.” just because the display shows it, doesn’t mean it’s accurate.
June 22nd, 2009 at 1:02 pm
Robert, yes I had the boss prefs numeric batt before and I restored to 3.0 and now I have both % and batt icon
June 22nd, 2009 at 2:14 pm
Also in sb settings
June 30th, 2009 at 5:19 am
I had the % on my iPhone 3G the first time i updated it to 3.0 from jailbroken 2.2.1.
I couldn’t turn on the % again after restoring the phone after that.
July 5th, 2009 at 2:01 pm
@ Craig : If you have installed boss Prefs you can disable it. open Bossprefs –> Extras –> disable numeric battery