iPhone and Android Autobrightness: Buggy, Useless
By Harry McCracken | Tuesday, October 26, 2010 at 8:54 am
My friend Dr. Ray Soneira of DisplayMate technologies has a long and fascinating guest post up at Gizmodo. Bottom line: He did a ton of testing on the auto-brightness features on the iPhone and Android handsets that are designed to make the screens legible in varying lighting while conserving battery life. And his data shows they just don’t work.
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October 26th, 2010 at 9:13 am
At least from personal experience, I'd have to disagree with his conclusion. Depending on the device, and perhaps the OS version, auto-brightness on Android is far from "effectively useless". In my case, I have a Motorola Droid (first generation) and have been using auto-brightness for quite a while. I see very little odd behavior from the auto-brightness algorithm, and it does function where it counts… brightening or dimming the screen as needed so that the device is usable indoors or out without manual adjustment (which must be done blindly if taking the phone out in the sun after previously using it indoors with a dimmed backlight).
October 26th, 2010 at 11:18 am
Auto brightness on my iPod touch 3rd gen running the lately iOS 4 is crap. I open play games at night in my dark bedroom. You would think the screen would be dim because the room is dark. It's not it's often near full brightness, so much that it hurts my eyes. It's not that big of a deal, I just manually adjust it.