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HP Introduces New Technology to Save Mobile Battery Life
fenimor writes "HP researchers have developed new technology to save battery life on mobile devices. Targeting one of the main culprits of battery consumption -- the display -- they've developed an energy-aware solution that dims parts of the screen that aren't in use. Display battery life lasts from two to 11 times longer, depending on what the user is doing."
Won't these problems be solved with OLEDs?
As far as I understand, Organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) will emit light from each pixel much like an LED does. This will not require a battery sucking back-light, and if necessary it would be easy to dim areas of the screen, just make parts of it darker/black and less/no light will be emitted from it.
More info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OLED
I recently had a similar experience to "highlighting of what you're looking at" and I enjoyed it.
It came with the new Xorg+New Nvidia Drivers+KDE Beta... with those three things you can turn on transparency where every window EXCEPT the one that is currently in focus is transparent.
Combine this with "Focus follows mouse" and it basically "highlights" the thing you are currently working on... while everything else melts into the background... literally!
If they integrated this with flat panels I could see it being useful for the only thing that was at full brightness is the window that is currently active... while the rest has been dimmed. I think this is pretty close to what the research in this story did (except it looks like they might have been even more fine grained than that).
Not only would it be a usability improvement... but also a savings in power. I'm interested to see if they can bring it to market!
Friedmud
You might be right about Windows users tending to maximize their apps on the screen, but I can assure you it's often NOT just because they bought poor quality monitors.
Rather, it's often because the apps put enough controls and toolbars up that maximizing is the only way to comfortably work in the software.
(With most of the MIDI/music sequencers and hard disk recording packages, it feels like you never have enough room for the mixer sliders, time counter window, musical notation window, and so on. They may as well hard code maximizing windows into those things!)
Even if you own a top-notch flat panel that does 1600x1200 resolution - the fonts are going to look awfully small at that point. (And yes, you can select "large fonts" in the Windows control panel, but that tends to be self-defeating -- sacrificing most of the screen real-estate you gained by going to a higher resolution in the first place.) 1024x768 is pretty much the "most common" resolution I see Windows desktops running in (assuming you don't have a wide-screen type display) - and I think it's because it's roughly the best compromise between resolution and overall font size. (Especially for older PC users, they really struggle with apps like Excel when you crank the resolution up higher - regardless of monitor sharpness.)
Kcontrol -> Desktop -> Window Behavior -> Translucency Tab. That controls transparency, and the Focus tab has Focus follows Mouse.