Why Auto-Brightness on iPhone, Android is Awful
The auto brightness settings don't work so well on these so-called "smart" phones.
In a controlled environment, like your office, you can set the brightness of your display how you want it and it'll be good for most of the time (unless you're lucky enough to have an office with giant windows). Smartphones, on the other hand, are constantly in a state of travel and will be under various different light conditions, varying from pitch darkness when you're hiding under a cardboard box to when you're under the blasting rays of the sun. For this reason, automatic brightness is an important feature of smartphones.
Sadly, the automatic brightness setting in your iPhone or your Android-based phone is terrible.
Dr. Raymond M. Soneira of DisplayMate exhaustively examined the auto-brightness settings for the iPhone 4 and several modern Android phones and found them to be useless.
"Automatic Brightness on existing smartphones is close to functionally useless because the manufacturers have not made the effort required to develop, evaluate and test the software and hardware so that they work properly and effectively," wrote Soneira. "All of the models we tested also have serious operational errors and bugs indicating how little an effort has been made to make them work (or rather not work) properly."
The problem with the iPhone automatic brightness is that the phone jacks up the brightness when it detects bright lights, but then it doesn't dim the display when things are dark again.
Android suffers from inconsistent settings that vary from manufacturer to manufacturer, with some leaving the automatic brightness cranked way too high on default, to being far too low even when outdoors in daylight. Android phones also do not offer a starting brightness slider when automatic brightness is enabled.
- Apple Passes RIM; Now 4th Largest Phone Vendor
- Samsung ''Nexus Two'' Gets Its First Hands-on
- Don't Attempt to Play Kinect Games Before Nov. 4
- PSP2 Will Pack More Horses Than Xbox 360
- Verizon to Give $52.8 Million for Bad Data Charges
- Happy 10th Birthday, PlayStation 2
- Apple Wanted to Buy Bungie, But Was Too Late
- Bionic Implant Combats Vertigo
- Gold Edition Zelda Catridge Doubles as HDD
- Pamela Anderson Movie Shot With a Smartphone
- Dalek-O-Lantern will EXTERMINATE!
- The Quirky Contort Keeps your Cables at Bay
- CAS Helps Firefighters Breathe Easy
- DashLink: the iPhone Dock for your Harley
- Crystalroc Presents the Galaxy Tab that Glitters
- ViewSonic ViewPads Dated for North America
- Ampoids: Curiously Strong Speakers
- RAGE HD on iPhone Will Be A Huge Game
- Honda's Concept Literally Runs on Air
They are completely wrong. Everyone with half a brain knows the iPhone sucks as adjusting brightness while Android phones are able to detect ambient light, angle of viewing by the user, if you have sunglasses on and even your mood to display the perfect brightness every time.
really, this guy tests auto brightness and probably makes more than me. fml
My DROID X seems to be alright.
The main brightness issue with the iPhone is the user...
Scoll to the bottom of this page http://www.displaymate.com/about.html to see what a pompous A$$ he really is... He probably thinks Bose is worth the price, too.
I shut mine off, I noticed this right away.
My DROID X seems to be alright.
Ditto. My DROID X does just fine when set to automatic brightness.
I just have a widget on my Samsung Galaxy where I can set the brightness easily and fast.
The main brightness issue with the iPhone is the user...
What, because it doesn't match your own opinion of what constitutes a suitable phone?
There is a difference in "having bugs" and absolutely useless or awful. I wish people would not exaggerate problems that much.
Oh come on, the sun was hitting it wrong...
I think they should make a better control for auto brightness. Instead of having one horizontal slider, have 4 or more vertical slider. The left most slider would be the brightness when in a zero light environment, the right most slider would be the brightness level when in direct sunlight. The remaining sliders would be percentages in between. It would also be useful to see the current ambient brightness on a horizontal slider. Then use linear interpolation between the sliders (it seems linear is best based on the graphs in this report).
[citation]The problem with the iPhone automatic brightness is that the phone jacks up the brightness when it detects bright lights, but then it doesn't dim the display when things are dark again.
[/citation]
It actually does dim the screen again, it just takes it a minute. Not sure if it's intentional or a bug though. If it's really bothering you, locking and unlocking the phone quickly will set the screen's brightness relative to the ambient light.
I don't particularly understand the problem, to be honest.
I took my iPhone (with Auto Brightness enabled) to Greece a few months ago and used it very comfortably in the blistering beach sunshine. I took it out on the same evenings and found it to be similarly usable.
Yes, the brightness does take a little time to decay from Bright to Dim, but this is generally fine since it takes my eyes time to adjust to the same change in any case.
Am I missing the point?
wow.... one feature my Sony Ericsson beats all these smartphones in... and this thing costs be no more than 150US$ a couple years ago!
I don't own any of the Western smartphones, but I leave them enabled on 2 out of my 3 devices. Sharp phones handle automatic brightness quite well, whereas NEC handsets somewhat fail at it.
Ditto. My DROID X does just fine when set to automatic brightness.
Double-ditto. With my previous phone, I was constantly having to adjust the brightness when I moved from the office to outside to my living-room couch. With my DROID X, I have yet to be in a situation where I felt I needed to adjust the brightness. In fact, until I read this article, I hadn't given the phone's auto-brightness feature a second thought... that tells me it's working just fine.
At least you can fix it on android. According to Jobs "tampering" with the iphone will make the phone worse. thats why open source wins, a developer can fix this easily, but for the iphone you gotta wait till the next gen iphone comes out to have a good fix if Jobs says its better for you.
auto brightness works fine on my Captivate. i leave it off most of the time tho, too much of a drag on battery life. plus super AMOLED basically works in almost any environment.
My iPhone 4 is set to 100% all the time
When I can't read because of the sun, I suddently think of suicide and can barely breath...
I love my iPhone 4 and I hope it will last forever.
He probably thinks Bose is worth the price, too.
You mean there's something wrong with this wave radio I bought from Paul Harvey?! Impossible!
Where's the Microsoft Kin? Doesn't it have auto-brightness? Oh right, it's a Microsoft product - of course it never works right.
Android 2.2 fixes all of the major auto brightness bugs. When my old Nexus One phone ran Eclair the screen's brightness would constantly change from bright to dim and back again. After Froyo came out this problem went away completely.
lol, the auto brightness of my winmo 6.1 phone is great. its about as fast as i can imagine auto brightness being. it may not be able to predict when i'm getting ready to walk into a bright light, but it comes close.
"the manufacturers have not made the effort required to develop, evaluate and test the software and hardware so that they work properly and effectively"
Yeah, I find this a problem with most things I buy...
Oh no when you walk from bright to dark to bright the auto screen brightness doesn't fix itself until you click the button on the top of the phone - get a life.
For the iPhone - your screwed, good luck gettings Jobs to change every iphone because of your ranting. For Android, if you don't like it then write the code to fix it - nuff' said.
Another waste of time, thanks Marcus
The main brightness issue with the iPhone is the user...
Have you considered applying for the "1 Free Internet" program? You qualify for 1 free internet.
My 5 inch screen Dell Streak is fine with auto bright off and maxed out I get 14 hours of life with battery saver app too. Also my Streak trumps your Droid X puny screen for those that have one!
Droid Eris here. Works fine for me. It goes to max brightness in sunlight and dims down in shade. Maybe iPhones just suck?
I am completely shocked to find that plenty of people here have Droid phones and find them to be absolutely flawless. I am also completely shocked to find that people are masquerading around as iPhone owners bashing the product.
Played with all of these phones. They all suck at changing the brightness level. You are a homer if you are saying otherwise. Haven't seen a single phone that did a great job at on the fly brightness adjustments.
The main brightness issue with the iPhone is the user...
Can we change the comments section to allow more than +20 points? Cause I wanna give this commenter more points.