Your iPhone battery life, to the second? Yeah, there's an app for that.

From the Department of Good Ideas....

If you've got an iPhone or an iPod with a fancy ol' touch screen, you know that battery power is often sub-par, even on a relatively new unit. In the past, you could slowly watch that bar at the top of your screen slide toward empty. Or, in the absence of a charger, you could de-activate the 3G function, turn down the brightness of the screen, cross your fingers, and try not to flip the phone off and on too much.

But now, a startup called CollegeKidApp – a strange name on first glance, but a surprisingly catchy one, once you've allowed to rattle around your cranium – has developed an application called "Battery Go!," which monitors the amount of talk, Internet, video, and music time you have remaining on your current battery charge. Like all good apps, this one's both simple and smart: a dashboard displays a countdown clock for each of the different functions, alongside a gauge measuring your overall battery life.

Best of all is the slider, which allows you to calculate various hypothetical scenarios. Let's say you want to watch a video, but you don't know if you're phone will last that long. This app can tell you. Or let's say you're going to be on a train for two hours, and are wondering if you can listen to the first two "Dirty Projectors" albums for the whole ride. Bingo – "Battery Go!" lets you know.

The app only costs $0.99. Not to sound too much like an advertising copy writer here, but that's a pretty good bargain.

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