battery plasmoid and remaining time..

[David Nolden]

Am Sonntag 17 Mai 2009 20:22:30 schrieb Aaron J. Seigo:
> On Thursday 14 May 2009, Chani wrote:
> > On May 14, 2009 13:25:19 Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> > > On Thursday 14 May 2009, David Nolden wrote:
> > > > Yes maybe, but to the average user the percentage will be a near
> > > > useless number.
> > >
> > > so people don't find the battery indicator on their cell phone useful?
> >
> > ugh, I hate that thing. what the hell does one bar mean?  it could mean a
> > couple of hours or a couple of days,
>
> which is actually the point. you can't figure it out, with your human brain
> that excels at fuzzy thinking, and you expect a computer to?
>
> you're asking for magic to happen. "please predict how many phone calls
> i'll get in the next 2 hours" <-- that's what it would take to translate
> "one bar" into "38 minutes left"
The computer can add use additional information for computing the time, like 
the power drain within the last minutes, and the exact power left in the 
battery. So unless you show all the information, eg. "recent power 
consumption" and "mah left in batter", the user anyway doesn't have a chance 
to compute a precise value manually.

How do you think about weather forecast?

My "left time" indicator is hell of a lot more precise then the usual weather 
forecast.

People know that weather forecasts are not precise, still they like them. They 
don't mistrust the whole evening news just because the forecast is not 
precise.

Everyone who has ever used a laptop know that the "battery time left" 
indicator is not precise, and if you make it a bit more clear that it's just 
an estimation in the UI, then this shouldn't be a concern.

Greetings, David