Mobile Display Backlight Tech

[altairauditore]

Hi,

Remember the old Nokia phones (monochrome and also colour LCD) had a passive display mode? The backlight would be off.. but the phone would display stuff like time and notifications on the display.. and it was readable..

Why don't current phones have this type of a feature? It would be pretty cool!
Saves battery + active notifications on LCD displays.

 

[Cerb]

My phone does that, turning the backlight off quite awhile before the LCD goes off. But, it's unusable.

It's surely just a problem of the LCD tech being used in those phones v. most of what we have today. E-ink would work, and there is color e-ink, but it can't do animations/video, so nobody seems to want to give it a shot, probably because it would necessitate a massive software development undertaking, relative to choosing a regular type of display.

 

[captainslow]

Modern LCDs probably don't do this because of the deeper blacks we have on the LCD's now. Older/less dense LCDs had that green background tinge, right? Which provides contrast for the LCD lettering to be seen easily. With the deeper blacks, this is hard to see unless you have really strong lighting, which, on today's devices, reflects off of the glass a lot.