When g-p-m doesn't have a complete profile of your battery, it tries to shutdown or hibernate when the known battery remaining is very low. If you've never tried to take your battery to 10%, g-p-m assumes it can't and calculates only the capacity it has seen being used.
This fixes many broken batteries. It also introduces a problem when you first start using the profiling code, in that g-p-m knows nothing about what the battery actually can do.
What about the following tooltip:
Laptop battery 30 minutes remaining (97%)
Battery discharge profile is estimated
Policy actions will not be performed until battery profiled
As usual, my spelling and grammar are sh1te and so suggestions welcome. The last line is far too techy, but I'm not sure what to write. Please add a comment to this blog (or email me) with better suggestions, thanks!
Even reading your description of the problem, I don't understand what you're trying to get across :D “I haven't seen this battery before. I estimate you can run for 30 minutes on this battery charge (97%), but you might be able to get much more out of it. My estimates will improve as you use the battery.” You might feel uncomfortable having the software talk in the first person; I haven't seen a better way of doing it that doesn't end up confusing people and using techie-speak (e.g., “New battery found” – “Huh? My battery isn't new!”)