Nexus One sees red, nearly doubles battery life? (video)

These five Nexus One smartphones may seem to have defects, but there's actually nothing wrong with their AMOLED screens -- the funky colors are an attempt to improve battery life by turning off unnecessary sub-pixel LEDs. Hooking up his handset to an industrial power meter, Android engineer Jeff Sharkey discovered a blood-red screen drew 42 percent less current than full color -- the least of any combination by far -- purportedly doubling the effective battery life of the phone. While you're probably not going to be able to test the requisite software patch for yourself unless you're mildly familiar with Google code, you'll find a video of the crimson wonder after the break to fuel your dreams of a eyestrain-free astronomy cheat sheet... and Android bullfighting, of course.

[Nej Posted Jul 4th 2010 12:21PM]

@Hazdaz

My mistake. Thank you for the clarification.

[ohnoitsaspider Posted Jul 4th 2010 3:04AM]

Can someone please redo the Nexus One battery life test with live wallpapers and bluetooth turned OFF- I turned it off on my phone and after 6 hours of normal usage without charging it has 95% battery left.

[sakz Posted Jul 4th 2010 4:09AM]

Instead of solid color, why not have a "just borders and text mode" .That would be more efficient and wouldnt look as bad....

[mark78 Posted Jul 4th 2010 4:59AM]

The Red screen also looks a lot darker than the normal screen. So how much % better is the battery life. If you dim the normal looking screen about 50%? I think this idea of only using red pixel is realy stupid.

[metanup Posted Jul 4th 2010 5:30AM]

Terminator is back

[ThomasK Posted Jul 4th 2010 5:48AM]

you are kidding but imho this is not useless - for many application, one color would be fine enough - e.g. displaying clock, showing "ipod" navigation etc.

[kiranmk2 Posted Jul 4th 2010 6:59AM]

Makes sense - current gen OLED displays use fluorescent green and blue and phosphorescent red. Phosphorescent emitters are up to 4 times more efficient than fluorescent emitters, but have shorter lifetimes. The next generation displays will have phosphorescent green too as the lifetimes have passed the acceptable limit so you'll be able to have red/yellow/orange/green displays too. Unfortunately phosphorescent blue is still some way off...

[DeeeCoder Posted Jul 4th 2010 7:00AM]

This is why Skynet choose to use RED as its display interface of choice for its line of Terminators. Because it makes its its fuel cell batteries last so much longer!

[magadget Posted Jul 4th 2010 7:23AM]

That’s the only way to make that piece of garbage last more than 1 h. While actually USING it.

Way to go, fanboiis.

[runadumb Posted Jul 4th 2010 7:55AM]

I know people go on about multitasking killing battery life but whenever I check what's been using up all the battery on my nexus one the screen is normally around 65-70%. Thats with the brightness down quite low as well. I hope screen tech makes leaps and bounds on power consumption over the next few years.

[Hazdaz Posted Jul 4th 2010 9:25AM]

While an interesting experiment, I find something just flat out "wrong" with having to go to such extremes for usable battery life
... be it a CPU that maybe should have been made using a more advanced process or a screen that possibly is too big or something inherently inefficient with the OS, but if you have to take a bright colorful display and use it as a monochrome display just to extend the battery life, then somethings wrong with the design of a device.

[Onil Posted Jul 4th 2010 9:57AM]

woow amazing!! If you can't improve the OS to reduce battery consumption, make the screen red. pretty stupid but... android users must be thinking it's an amazing thing but the iPhone 4 have a great battery life without hurting your eyes...(please do not start talking about signal problems)!!

[Makali Posted Jul 4th 2010 10:28AM]

Red color you say ...can it make a call from your left hand

[Jack Posted Jul 4th 2010 3:53PM]

Why do you need better battery life if you can just replace the battery? Isn't that the argument constantly being used by idiots arguing that the iPhone sucks because you can't replace the battery even though it has better battery life by far than any other smartphone?

So which is it, people? Does battery life matter or not? You need to pick one and get your arguments straight.

[Garst Posted Jul 5th 2010 3:08PM]

So we're going back to monochrome screens? So much for the rise of the smartphone! Are we going back to carrrying a giant battery in a bag to get longer battery life as well?

[gentlefury Posted Jul 5th 2010 10:28PM]

Did someone actually have to test this??? It is already common knowledge that since red is the strongest color in the spectrum it requires the least energy to reproduce it with LEDs...this is why gameboy VR used a red led output.

Blue/Violet would drain the battery the most.

[mzsigler Posted Jul 11th 2010 7:53AM]

Included in CyanogenMod 6 RC1 for Nexus One.

http://sigsays.com/technology/cyanogenmod-6-rc1-for-nexus-one-is-out-edit-includes-all-red-screen-battery-saver-mode/

[Andrew5000 Posted Jul 19th 2010 5:48PM]

I guess this is why predators and the terminator had red UIs on their visors?

Shows how skynet is way ahead of google. Imagine skynet or the predators' cellphones, it could give Apple a run for their money hehe.

[fjones Posted Aug 2nd 2010 4:29PM]

I can't do the all red screen! I search using Black Google Mobile at http://bGoog.com to get a longer battery life on my AMOLED phone and to reduce my data usage. I definitely have noticed a longer battery life since using only black backgrounds on my phone.