Do you find your phone's screen to be too bright at night?
Do you happen to use a brightness control app yet find it inadequate?
Do you find your phone's battery dying quickly due to it's display?
If you answered yes to any of those questions, I found an app that will adjust the brightness of your phone while helping you save some battery life in the process. (Wow I sound like a crummy salesman haha ><) I'm willing to bet many Android users surf the net or play games while in the dark. The brightness of the screen is quite irritating and overpowering to some. One solution is to use a brightness adjustment app. Using such an app has a drawback. Many brightness adjustment apps on the Android Market only adjust the brightness down to 10%. Yes, 10% sounds low but even at low brightness, the screen is still blinding in the dark. Staring at such brightness may damage your eyes in the long run.
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| Normal |
Now without further ado, here is the solution to prevent your phone from burning holes in your eyes. This app is known as
Screen Filter by
Haxor Industry. This helpful app applies a nightshade to your phone thus dramatically reducing screen brightness. Unlike other apps, the developer claims Screen Filter uses a logarithmic scale to adjust brightness which allows for fine-grain control. This creates a tint rather than just adjusting the brightness of the screen which does not hinder legibility.
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| 46.7% Setting (dark) |
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| 41.6% setting (darker) |
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| If you click the app in the notification bar, it'll toggle settings |
Some of the features found in this app are:
-Tasker/Locale plug-ins (this allows the ability to automate your phone using
Tasker or
Locale)
-Toggle on/off ability (If you put a shortcut icon on your desktop, you can use the icon to toggle on/off)
-Confirms very low brightness settings (Nifty feature so you don't accidentally make your screen too dark)
One of my favorite features found in this app is the ability to turn off the soft-key backlight. The softkeys are your hardware buttons which glow in low light due to the ambient sensor. Sometimes even these softkeys can be quite bright so it's nice to have an option to turn it off. It works great on my phone (HTC Aria) but the developer mentioned it doesn't work on all phones.
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| Filter adjustment and ability to disable softkey backlight |
Overall this is a very nice app. I've been using it for about a month. I've noticed my battery life lasts a little longer since using this app. I'm not sure if it's a placebo effect but I'm guessing since the screen isn't pumping out as much juice, some battery life is spared. There are a few bugs but it's to be expected from a work in progress. I noticed on a few occasions where the app would revert back to normal settings. It's not a big deal as you can re-enable it. The developer is quite prompt with updates so many bugs have been ironed out.
Check out this great app. It's
FREE on the Android Market. Perhaps you'll save some battery life and help prevent damage to your eyes in the process.
