Google Says Adding Dark Mode To Apps Saves Battery (betanews.com) 61
Dark Mode is not just more aesthetically pleasing to many people, there are real battery-life boosts to be had -- and Google has the numbers to prove it. From a report: Touting the benefits of Dark Mode, Google showed that with screen brightness set to 50 percent, using YouTube with Dark Mode enabled resulted in 14 percent less battery usage. With screen brightness set to 100 percent, the saving jumps to 60 percent. These are not numbers to be sniffed at, but the biggest savings are to be seen on phones with AMOLED screens as anything that is black does not require pixels to be powered. Slides from the event show Google comparing the power usage of its own Pixel phone with an LCD iPhone 7. It shows a 63 percent battery saving when displaying a screenshot of Google Maps in normal and night mode.
Here's my question (Score:3)
Re:Here's my question (Score:4, Interesting)
They are backlit, but many new displays will dim or turn off the backlight in darker regions of the screen.
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They are backlit, but many new displays will dim or turn off the backlight in darker regions of the screen.
Are there any phones doing local dimming? Aren't the majority of LCD screens on phones edge lit?
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OLED is per-pixel dimming.
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I found a claim that new monitors started doing this around 2005, and that (post from 2013) "the majority of monitor sales" do this. So, it's good to have on real computers, too.
I'd thus like to advertise a nice GTK2+3 theme: you want to "apt install darkcold-gtk-theme" (or darkmint if you prefer green). Despite no css skills I fixed them up, and since then the original author returned from years of no show. Somehow, any other theme shipped in Debian is at most mid-gray rather than actual black.
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Unless you're using an OLED display, or one with local dimmin, a dark theme does nothing to save energy
Right then. A dark theme is still good for your eyes during the night, so you save wetware even if no electricity.
Re: Here's my question (Score:1)
AMOLED screens, such as those Samsung uses, do not have a backlight.
It's why Samsung has massive screens and always on screen features without obliterating battery life.
They are also better looking.
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Re:Here's my question (Score:5, Informative)
LCD screens yes. Google is talking about their phone with an OLED screen. In OLED screens each pixel actually emits light, so turning it off (or down) saves energy.
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Actually LCDs save power too. The backlight is constant but most common LCD technologies will actually use energy to block the light away from its default transparent arrangement.
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LCDs use energy to twist the crystals and change the polarization. It's pretty arbitrary what the rest state is, but when I looked previously it seemed like most LCDs were set up for a default light blocking state. Might have changed of course, but it would seem to make sense to orient the polarizer so the rest state was whatever used the least energy on average.
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you can usually tell by looking when it's powered off.
In high school, when a TI-30 (?) was the basic thing most had for Physics, we discovered that one of the variants had a case that would pop open easily.
We would grab an unwatched phone, hide behind one of those dinosaurs that still walked the earth, and flip the display--giving our victim white numbers on a black background.
Then we'd do something innocuous to get him to look at the calculator, and enjoy the ensuing panic . . .
hawk
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Aside from the fact that a large portion of phones on the market use OLED displays, and they consume power only to light up individual pixels having no backlight, you are right while you don't understand why.
On an LCD you block light to make pixels black, this incidentally uses power, when the power is released the LCD becomes transparent. That said it isn't really relevant, it's a minor difference in power compared to an OLED panel.
Pixel 3 vs iPhone 7 (Score:1)
Google comparing its $799 phone with $449 iPhone. WOW.
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Google comparing its $799 phone with $449 iPhone. WOW.
It's worse than that: Google comparing its $799 latest flagship phone with a 2 years old $449 iPhone.
WOW indeed.
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They compared the ORIGINAL Pixel to the iPhone 7, not the Pixel 3. Both phones came out in 2016, just one month apart. Please learn how to read before you start jerking your knee, you illiterate, raging fanboi.
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Not dark mode. Take the glaring blinding white of Google's home page makes it impossible to use inside a moviehouse or place of worship...
I have a better alternative up front.
Don't use your fucking smartphone inside a moviehouse or place of worship.
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Yeah, but, can I eat popcorn and slurp a giant soda in church and stand up, raise my hands, and "speak" in tongues in a movie house? No? Then, why are you equating these two things?
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+1 million informative.
Whoooo...Caahh... (Score:3, Funny)
Behold, the lack of power of the dark mode.
Duh (Score:3)
NO SHIT, SHERLOCK. (Score:1)
Thanks for admitting your design team is being run by retards.
Black Pixels (Score:2)
Whether or not black pixels save energy is the technological equivalent of the "are eggs healthy" debate:
CRT screen? Black saves energy over white by not firing the beam at the dark pixels.
LCD screen? White saves energy over black by not diffusing the backlight.
OLED/AMOLED screen? Black saves energy by not lighting the pixel.
So will the next revolution in display technology swing the pendulum back?
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LCD screen? White saves energy over black by not diffusing the backlight.
Wrong. Most LCD configurations are transparent without energy and block light when energy is applied. The difference is only slight compared to OLED / CRT (unless you have a HDR display where the backlight adjusts depending on the content) but none the less black is actually the energy saving state not white.
Google late to the party (Score:3)
Google finally realises what Samsung users have known about for over 8 years thanks to a long history of using OLED displays.
Seriously the energy saving benefits on not lighting the screen up actually made it into Samsung's variant of Eclair back in the day which gave you the option to use a dark mode or invert the display.
Dark backgrounds... (Score:2)
Google Homepage (Score:3)
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dark google - blackle ! (Score:2)
Um, duh? (Score:2)
Why is this news? We've known this for years:
https://www.greenbot.com/artic... [greenbot.com]
What next? We need Google to announce that water is wet so that people can finally go jump in a lake?