The battery widget is one of the most overlooked and underappreciated Pixel phone gems

When I set up my phone screens, I’m always conscious of how the information displayed benefits my workflow and my life in general. More often than not, I will place apps that tie more closely into my personal life than my business endeavors. For example, I’ll place a photo frame with pictures of my son to replace the traditional photo in the wallet setup or I’ll add a Keep notes widget to brain dump my thoughts in the morning.

Outside of these widgets, I really haven’t played around too much with Google’s revamped Android designs. While it may have released over six months ago, I’m ashamed to say that I never truly tried out Google’s new Pixel battery widget either. Now that I dropped it onto my secondary home screen, I’ve become a bit obsessed with it!

You see, it’s not just a phone battery widget. If you connect your Pixel Buds, it will intelligently add them to the display, letting you see not only the charge of the case, but of each individual bud as well. On top of that, resizing the widget itself changes which information can be displayed based on its width and height.

My fascination with this comes primarily from this thoughtful design decision. It truly makes this one of the phone’s most useful yet hidden gems. If you have a lot of space to place the battery widget, it will show your phone, Pixel Bud case, and the left and right earbuds.

When you shrink it down, it first gets rid of the case battery as it’s less important to you than the individual buds. Shrinking it further combines both buds into one icon with a unified battery average across the two. Beyond that at the smallest widget size, only the Pixel Buds’ battery will display.

It truly is the small things that make the experience, and this is one that stood out to me. Ultimately, it cycles through the hierarchy of the most “important” devices first and works up from there. One would think that your phone’s battery is more important, and you’d be right, but in the case of the buds, they tend to be something you monitor more frequently for their lesser battery life.

Truth be told, each of Google’s new Material You widgets employ the same thoughtful adaptations depending on their size, but to me, it’s a lot cooler when they combine the devices into one display than when they just show fewer books or songs on the YouTube Music and Play Books app widgets, for example.

Let me know in the comments if you’re utilizing the battery widget or if you just look at the top status bar of your phone. I’m leaning towards this information being displayed in a larger format and taking less effort to decypher being better, so I thought I would share!