Have you ever jealously eyed up the battery usage stats in a friend's Android-powered phone? Now available in Ovi Store for all S60 5th Edition and Symbian^3 models is 'Nokia Battery Monitor', a joint development between Nokia and VTT Technical Research Centre in Finland. It runs in the background, gathers information on exactly where your battery power is going and predicts how long you've got to go before the dreaded 'power saving mode' kicks in. See below for links, screens and more details.

Categories for battery consumption are:

• Talk
• Web browsing
• Music playback
• Home screen
• Messaging
• GPS and navigation
• Gallery
• Camera
• Other

Usage for each of these is logged and is shown, colour-coded, in a report screen. Will Nokia Battery Monitor help you extend battery life by avoiding specific activities? The jury's out on that one (watch AAS early next week for a big feature on power from me), but more information is always a good thing. And, being written by Nokia, the utility shouldn't abuse the OS or consume too many resources itself!

There's a homescreen widget for supported devices and this echoes whichever of the five 'Estimates' you've tapped on the application's main screen, for an at a glance readout. Tapping on the widget also launches, or switches to, Nokia Battery Monitor.

Displayed here is the 'dark theme', though tapping on Options also shows a 'light theme' available. And, on a theme I'll be returning to next week, you really don't want to go there on devices with OLED screens - stick to the dark one - it also looks classier.

You can grab the utility from the Ovi Store on your device or from here.

Steve Litchfield, AAS