This panel controls whether or not a battery state icon appears in KDE's panel.
Once enabled a battery will appear in your docking bar as one of 3 icons - a battery with a red X through it indicates that APM has not been installed (in particular /proc/apm can't be read).
The other two icons indicate the battery state - a small plug with a bar beside it indictes your batteries are charging - the height of the blue portion of the bar indicate how full your batteries are. A small battery in the dock indicates you are running on batteries, the amount of blue in the battery indicates how full your batteries are.
If you left-click on the docked icon a pop-up will tell you how much time you have left in minutes.
If you right-click you get a pop-up that lets you put your laptop into suspend or standby modes - or to bringup the laptop configuration widget.
All features of Battery are configured from the Setup dialog.
The general preferences for each profile are contained in this tab. There are four fields here:
This controls whether or not the battery icon appears. This is disabled by default.
This controls whether or not Battery will start docked into the panel or not when the user exits the setup dialog. Note that it is still possible to switch between docked and undocked regardless of this option. This only controls the initial state. Being undocked is pretty useless. This is checked by default.
This setting controls how much time Battery will wait until it checks the battery state again. The time is in seconds. The default is 20 seconds.
Battery uses three icons to represent the three states: No APM, Charging, and Not Charging. The icons shown are the "large" icons. To select new ones, click on the buttons and a icon loader dialog will pop up.
Note - if you create your own icons - they will work with Battery - but be carefull all the exactly white pixels in the icon get filled by blue for the battery meter - if you want some white looking pixels to stay choose a slightly off-white or grey color for them.
The author claims not to be a graphic artist and would love for someone to donate some prettier looking icons to the cause.