• trafficnab@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    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)?

    • DrM@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      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

      • trafficnab@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        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?

        • WhoRoger@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          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.

      • MooseBoys@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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.

    • soggy_kitty
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      1 year ago

      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

    • tehmics@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      OLED does see significant power benefits for black pixels but it’s no where close to lighting just a single LED