A few months ago, I received a 12.9 inch iPad Pro and an Apple Pencil at work. I charged up the Pencil (it charges with a lightning cable via a small adapter) and started annotating PDFs. The Pencil performed this task admirably and using it was a wonderful, almost magical, experience. After a few days the Pencil stopped working, but after brief charge I was back in business. This experience caused me to wonder how I could determine the Pencil’s battery level. I was baffled because the Pencil itself does not sport LEDs (or anything else) that might indicate its battery level. With Apple’s attention to detail, I figured they must have included some mechanism for this. After some searching, I found in iOS 10 there is a Widget called “Battery” that displays the charge level of a paired Bluetooth device. After adding the Widget to the “Today View” on the Home screen, I could now view the charge level of the iPad and the Apple Pencil on the Home screen. (In a subsequent iOS update the iPad does display a “low charge” notification when the Pencil’s charge drops to 5%).

“Batteries” Widget

One note about the widget. The Pencil needs to be paired with the iPad and within Bluetooth range for the widget to appear on the Home screen.