TI develops battery meters that work

We're quite sick of Windows XP telling us we have 30 or 40 minutes of juice left on our laptop only to have the system shut down unexpectedly just a few minutes later, so we're quite excited to hear of Texas Instruments developing a system for an accurate battery gauge. The system uses two chip sets to continuously calculate remaining energy (systems now don't take into effect the battery age and usage patterns) and could give users accuracy within 1 percent. The first batteries are set for notebooks in the middle of 2005, and if it proves successful, TI will make them for handheld audio and video players, too.