Windows is finally getting smart about battery icons

Microsoft is finally testing a way for you to quickly see how much battery your laptop has left — and with color-coded visual indicators, to boot.

It’s an extremely welcome addition, which had been left up to laptop makers to step in and provide (or not) in recent years. Unfortunately, for now it’s part of Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26120.3000 (KB5050103), via the Dev Channel — which means that Microsoft may rescind it, and it probably won’t arrive on “stable” mainstream PCs for several months.

The new iconography is pretty self-explanatory: Green signals a laptop with plenty of battery life left. A red icon means that you better plug in soon. Yellow means that you’re running low on power, and that (in this build) your laptop is running in its low-power, battery-saver mode.

(Microsoft seems to have been a bit confused in its example, however, since the “yellow” icon here is associated with a laptop battery at 80 percent. Microsoft said that the yellow icon will generally trigger only at 20 percent or below.)

To be clear, you’re not obligated to allow Windows to confront you with actual battery percentage, just the icons.

Microsoft has a separate toggle to turn on the battery percentage next to icon itself. To enable this, go to Settings > Power & battery and toggle on the “Battery Percentage” setting, Microsoft said in a blog post. Even better, Microsoft plans to add these battery indicators to the lock screen in a future Windows build.

This does seem like a useful feature, though there’s room for improvement. For some reason, neither phones nor laptops really offer a “time to empty” feature that allows you to see how long your battery will last in hours and minutes — though most cars will try and guess how many miles it will go before it runs out of gas or electricity. That would be nice to have.

Microsoft is also testing another useful little feature: the ability to use your Xbox gamepad as an on-screen keyboard. While that’s certainly not as useful as a physical keyboard or even voice dictation, I’ve been surprised at how quickly I can type with an Xbox keyboard. Apparently, others feel the same.

Microsoft ended on a sad note: The 2022 “suggested actions” feature proved unpopular with users, and Microsoft killed it in December.