ubuntu-phone team mailing list archive

[Oliver Grawert <ogra@xxxxxxxxxx>]

hi,
Am Mittwoch, den 26.03.2014, 07:08 +0100 schrieb Martin Pitt:
> Tim Peeters [2014-03-26  1:51 +0100]:
> > I guess that is a matter of taste. One thing to consider though, is that a
> > dark background may be beneficial for the battery life of the device.
> 
> Oh, is it? TFT displays don't work like that: the background
> illumination is always the same, and the display pixels just
> filter/hide it at that particular position. So if anything, you save
> battery life with dark text on bright background (i. e. the new theme)
> as you can generally use a lot less intense background illumination.
> 
> That's of course different for active displays where the pixels
> themselves emit light (OLED, plasma, etc.).
> 
> I'm not up to date on that, but I'm curious: What's the usual
> technology on current phones? The ones I see regularly are already two
> or three years old, and definitively have TFT. It appears to me that
> the Nexus 4 is TFT as well, but I could be wrong of course. I had the
> impression that OLEDs are not yet mature enough for hi-res phones, but
> maybe they are now?
> 
> That said, a purely personal emotion: yay for a black-on-bright
> schema! It's so much more eye friendly while you are in a bright
> environment, and I tend to use my phone a lot more during the day than
> at night. A white-on-black "night mode" based on the illumination
> sensor or just the time of day would be extra-cool, of course :)

It really depends on the price class of your phone ... AMOLED IPS active
matrix displays can actually completely turn off power to pixels that
are black ... 

quoting from [1]:

"As an example, one commercial QVGA OLED display consumes 0.3 watts
while showing white text on a black background, but more than 0.7 watts
showing black text on a white background, while an LCD may consume only
a constant 0.35 watts regardless of what is being shown on screen."

PS: I would personally also prefer to be able to adjust my wallpaper and
i think UI personalization is an essential thing for many phone
users ... if nothing else we should at least also ship a dark theme you
can select.

ciao
	oli

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMOLED#Comparison_to_other_technologies

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