Developer Jeff Sharkey has come up with an Android hack for OLED display phones (Nexus One, Incredible, etc) that he claims almost doubles battery life: go into “night vision” mode by filtering “separate pixel elements for each color channel” so that only one color shows at a time (red works best) .
First of all, it’s worth noting that he did this hack in airplane mode with GPS off, though it doesn’t seem that that is necessary for the hack to work. As Sharkey puts it:
Filtering to show only red pixels only requires 35% of the original baseline OLED panel current, on average. Adding back the baseline current, the best case overall is about 42% of the original system current, effectively doubling the battery life. Also, showing only red pixels doubles as an awesome night vision mode, perfect for astronomy.
The hack uses a “low-level window compositer” called SurfaceFlinger. Have to say, after watching this video, we would certainly pay for an app that does this (heck, maybe even if it doesn’t save that much battery – it just looks cool):
Images and video by Jeff Sharkey.
I’m an Android owner now and the only bad thing about this phone? It drinks power like a runner drinks water.
I hope this works because, yeah, I’ll pay for it. I already have two batteries for my phone but can easily go through both if I don’t have a charger with me.
This looks pretty slick. I sure hope Sharkey can manage to turn this into a stand-alone app and release an .apk, because otherwise, I’m in over my head, lol
I’m an HTC Hero owner and I’ve been very happy with my battery life. It has yet to let me down.
Ridiculous. Everything I’ve seen about cutting battery usage for these phone results in not being able to use it as designed. Turn a colour display into mono tone, turn the brightness down, don’t do this, don’t do that, keep it switched off! That’ll save some battery..
How about… I dunno. Making a f’ing battery that lasts more than 5 minutes!
Kudos to the developer but really. The battery life on these things is a joke and no amount of “not using it the way it should be used”, is just a detraction from owning one.
My Nexus One get great battery life with a couple of simple tweaks. First, if you spend part of your day away from your phone, put it in airplane mode. I work in a high-security environment, and we’re not allowed to have cells phones in the office. My office is also in the basement of the building, were T-Mobile’s signal doesn’t reach. But the phone will continue to search for both a cell and data signal if left on. So, before I lock it up, I drop to airplane mode. I can leave the phone one (keeps me from having to restart when I go home), and it won’t seek signals, which leave my battery in excellent shape. When the screen blanked and airplane mode, I’ve locked up the phone with a 90% charge and come back 8 hours later with 85% left.
Running the battery down to shutoff, then recharging it over night with an extra hour or two on the charger will also help recalibrate the battery and prolong the life. This is true of nearly all LI-ON batteries.
And just toggling off features you don’t use helps, too. If you don’t need wi-fi, Bluetooth or the GPS, shut them off.
Joe, that is true of NiCad batteries, not LiPo.
This hack job is great! Now I can prolong my Android phones battery life.