Android SurfaceFlinger tricks for fun and profit | Hacker News Reader

Android SurfaceFlinger tricks for fun and profit

jsharkey.org

62 pointsthere9 comments

"All measurements taken in airplane mode with GPS disabled."

"…the best case overall is about 42% of the original system current, effectively doubling the battery life."

If you don't use most of your actual phone features, that is, but still have the screen turned on. Whereas the regular scenario has those power leeches on, but the screen off. Still, nice experiment.

Yeah, looking at the battery use meters on my N1, display is usually in 2nd place at around 25-35% of total usage (with cell standby as the top battery user). So the savings wouldn't be quite as dramatic, but you could certainly get some extra time out of the battery.

Except generally when the screen is off, you're not using the GPS. Also when you're talking on the phone, the screen is on also.

The exciting thing for me is to choosing a flux[1]-like filter at night, to be easier on my eyes.

[1] http://www.stereopsis.com/flux/

Interesting. I'd just been searching earlier to see if anyone had created a green only ereader for OLED displays. I was wondering how good green-only text displayed since there had been talk about the Nexus One pentile matrix being sub-optimal for b/w text.

It's neat that it can be done, but I'd have to be pretty desperate to save some battery juice to use any of these in practice.

I've yet to know a smartphone user who didn't have to worry about battery life and never experienced their phone dying when they needed it. Being able to have many options for putting your phone into a lower power configuration (turning off 3G, changing screen brightness, maybe even changing the screen color) seem pretty useful for those not so rare situations where you need to stretch battery life.

In practice, I charge my phone when I go to bed. So as long as the phone lasts for the day's usage, I'm all set. (I don't know how long Android phones' battery typically lasts.)

My N1 is fine for two days, the third day it becomes risky.

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