Wait, aren’t most phones OLED? Wouldn’t it be trivial to light up a few pixels in the corner of the screen when it’s off? Do phones not do this (I’m still running my S7 into the ground so I have a dedicated LED)?
It’s not trivial. An LED only needs power to light up, an OLED Pixel always needs the GPU to be powered on and it would be a significant power loss to implement a pixel sadly
The full Always On Display (which shows the clock + some notifications) uses less than 1% battery per hour on my ancient S7, are new phones not any better than that?
It doesn’t if the screen is connected directly to the frame buffer which can refresh independently. Whether that’s actually implemented this way in hardware, well who knows, but I suspect it is as that’s useful to display any static image. Then just power up the display driver for a microsecond to refresh the image if needed.
None of this is true. It may happen in practice on some poorly-designed devices, but the “GPU” in the SoC can remain powered off, and the display controller remain in low-power mode.
Wait, aren’t most phones OLED? Wouldn’t it be trivial to light up a few pixels in the corner of the screen when it’s off? Do phones not do this (I’m still running my S7 into the ground so I have a dedicated LED)?
It’s not trivial. An LED only needs power to light up, an OLED Pixel always needs the GPU to be powered on and it would be a significant power loss to implement a pixel sadly
The full Always On Display (which shows the clock + some notifications) uses less than 1% battery per hour on my ancient S7, are new phones not any better than that?
It doesn’t if the screen is connected directly to the frame buffer which can refresh independently. Whether that’s actually implemented this way in hardware, well who knows, but I suspect it is as that’s useful to display any static image. Then just power up the display driver for a microsecond to refresh the image if needed.
None of this is true. It may happen in practice on some poorly-designed devices, but the “GPU” in the SoC can remain powered off, and the display controller remain in low-power mode.
I mean there’s a ton of phones that have always on displays (AOD)
yeah samsung has a feature for this in good look
Which setting? I don’t think I see it
Huh, you’re right, I don’t see it anymore either. Could be they removed it, or maybe I’m just looking in the wrong place.
I have my always on display which gives me icons of the notifications in a predictable place on screen all the time.
My battery still lasts a full day so power concerns not an issue
OLED does see significant power benefits for black pixels but it’s no where close to lighting just a single LED