Your Battery Number Is a Guess

That battery number is a guess. Tag the friend who panics at ten percent. Your phone shows a battery percentage, a clean, exact-looking number sitting right there in the corner of the screen. It feels like a plain fact.

Ta številka baterije je samo ugibanje. Označi prijatelja, ki spanikira pri desetih odstotkih. Telefon ti pokaže odstotek baterije, čisto, natančno videti številko v kotu zaslona. Zdi se kot preprosto dejstvo.

It is not a direct measurement. There is no simple way to open up a battery and read how much power is left inside it. Instead, the phone checks the voltage and the flow of electricity moving through the battery, then runs those numbers through a small program that estimates the rest, based on how similar batteries usually behave.

To ni neposredna meritev. Ni preprostega načina, da bi odprl baterijo in prebral, koliko energije je še v njej. Namesto tega telefon izmeri napetost in tok, ki teče skozi baterijo, nato pa ti vrednosti požene skozi majhen program, ki oceni ostalo na podlagi tega, kako se podobne baterije običajno obnašajo.

That is why the number can jump around strangely, dropping fast in cold weather or staying stuck at one percent for far longer than expected. The battery itself is not broken. The phone is only guessing, as carefully as it possibly can, and updating its guess every few seconds.

Zato številka včasih čudno skače, v mrazu hitro pada ali pa obtiči pri enem odstotku veliko dlje, kot bi pričakoval. Baterija ni pokvarjena. Telefon samo ugiba, kar se da natančno, in svoje ugibanje popravlja vsakih nekaj sekund.