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iPhone 4, Android and Macbook Auto-Brightness Features are Useless
Brandon Davenport
You know when you sit with your iPhone in the dark, and the screen brightness is still glaring when you have turned auto brightness on? It should be at minimum, and this goes the same with Android phones. It doesn’t make sense to have the auto-brightness on when it does nothing useful, and in the end renders itself useless — here’s how:
The light sensor on iPhones Macbooks and Android devices
There is an ambient light sensor on Android and iPhone handsets that is right beside the earpiece that is supposed to sense how dark it is in the room, and adjust the light accordingly. Instead, the light sensor measures the light bouncing off of your face that comes from the screen — so the phone thinks that the room is still bright, even though it is far from it.
The same goes with the Macbook, but even worse — when you have the backlit keyboard set to turn off when it is bright, it never does, but it stays on (or turns off) in the dark. Also, the screen brightness isn’t always accurate because of the same issue — measuring the light bouncing off your face and torso instead of the actual room. Poor design choices because the backlight on screens account for nearly 50% of power consumption on mobile phones, and if auto-brightness doesn’t work, we need to deem it useless.
“One behavior of the iPhone 4 Auto-Brightness that is a serious operational error or bug is that it locks onto the brightest ambient light sensor value that it has measured at any point starting from the time it was turned on, and then continues to use that highest value indefinitely to set the screen brightness until the display turns off – either by cycling through sleep mode or full power off” — Dr. Raymond M. Soneira - DisplayMate
Does this stuff happen to you?
So essentially, auto-screen brightness features on iPhones, Androids and Macbooks are pretty useless, but we want to know if you have had any experience with these issues. Does it bug the hell out of you, or does it go un-noticed? Leave a comment!
Read more — Dr. Raymond M. Soneira’s full article on Gizmodo
