Does anyone know how backlight is suppose to work for Home, Menu, Back and Search keys? Is it suppose to stay on as long as the screen backlight stays on or is it certain amount of time? What triggers them to come on- key press, screen touch, trackpad touch or all of the above? Mine don't seem to follow any rhyme or reason, at least I couldn't trace a pattern. I know that I was messing around with the phone last night in the dark and they would come on and go off as they pleased. Does light sensor have anything to do with it? Please sound off your findings and ideas.
Thanks!
Mine don't seem to follow any rhyme or reason either - it's a bit maddening. And the same goes for the backlight of the physical keyboard (sometimes it comes on, sometimes it doesn't - no telling why), and also the automatic adjustment of brightness (i use the phone for a minute and suddenly it gets super-bright).
Hopefully these are all just bugs that will be fixed with an OTA update, but it is weird and I'm glad to know it's not just my unit since I don't want to replace it (I got a solid hinge - good stuff!).
I think I figured it out. Backlight for touch keys is controlled by light sensor and also has a timer (few seconds), so if it's bright enough outside - they will not even come on. If it's dark - they come on and stay on for certain time then go off untill you press one of them again.
Now, the other thing that I'm noticing is that my haptic feedback is not working when pressing one of those buttons or long-pressing the screen. Anyone else has that problem?
I have used my phone primarily in the dark. All my lights are always on (when the screen is) and the auto-brightness is too bright. If I turn brightness to minimum, the always on lights are way too bright compared to the screen. I really wish the designers had tried to use this phone in the dark (laying in bed) and realized the auto-brightness and lights are too bright in pitch-dark!
Also I am getting real sick of rotation. On my G1 I could disable it completely unless the keyboard was out. I like to lay in bed or on a couch and use my phone sideways, but not rotated. This seems impossible to do on the G2. Disabling rotation doesn't do anything for 3rd party apps or even GMail for that matter. For some reason this was not the case on the G1.
It will be hard to go back to the G1's one-second+ lag after every press and the incredibly slow loading webpages now that I have experienced the G2, but there are too many really annoying problems, so I think it is getting sent back.
if you have your backlight set to automatic... it will cut on only if the room is dark... check your backlight settings
It's an issue with the way android uses the light sensor. It's very poorly coded.
Related
Is it possible to one day change the keyboard backlight brightness? Under normal lighting conditions the backlight on the bronze G1 washes out the letters making it extremely difficult to see the keys.
The backlights under the keyboard and the chin buttons seem to be very dim and I would guess that there is a way to adjust the brightness as can be done with the display backlight.
Hopefully someone can look into seeing if it's possible or an official patch is released to raise the brightness. A different color would have been better, too bad the whole "put blue LEDs in every damn consumer product" trend is over, I think blue LEDs would be much more visible.
i haven't had any problems with the brightness, but what really bothers me is that the backlight turns off so damn fast. On my old Dash, the keyboard light was controlled directly by the screen's backlight. If the screen was lit up, so was the keyboard.
I'm getting really tired of hitting the menu button to turn the lights back on without messing anything up.
chefgon said:
I'm getting really tired of hitting the menu button to turn the lights back on without messing anything up.
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It annoys me too, but tip: nudge the trackball a tiny bit, not enough to move the cursor. You'll get used to it until there is some type of fix.
Hi,
i have a problem with my three days old HD. Besides the fact it seems to be much slower than it should be, the problem is the screen goes dim after a while. I'm not talking about it going black after a while, like it's supposed to, but in normal working mode it just kinda becomes darker, kinda like notebook screen goes a little dim when you unplug it from power. When i turn it on, it looks ok, but after a while, mostly after it first time goes black due to inactivity, the screen looks dimmed, no matter what i do, and after a few minutes it returns to normal, without any apparent reason, kinda random. At first i thought it might be something in HDTweak, so i did the factory reset, but it's happening again. Any ideas?
Try disabling the light sensor. It is supposed to adjust the screen brightness automatically, depending on the external light conditions. You can disable it in 'Energy', under Start -> Settings.
Well, it sort of works. When i disable the light sensor, i get the screen for adjusting the light on battery and AC. When i adjust the slider for battery, the screen lights up and it's ok. But, the moment the device locks itself (via HDTweak setting, the only thing i adjusted in HDTweak, it dims, and when i unlock it, it's still dimmed. Then when i again go into light sensor setting and press on the slider, it lights up. I don't understand what's going on. Faulty device maybe?
Also try changing the settings in the advanced tab.
Adding a minute or reducing a minute here seems to kickstart the device - and the annoying screen dimming goes away.
r
Andrew
When I have my nexus one set to automatically adjust brightness, it doesn't seem to do anything.
I can move it between dark and bright environments and the screen brightness doesn't seem to change at all. Am I missing something or is this feature not working on my phone?
It works fine with mine. I just clicked auto in the brightness setting. Make sure you didn't accidentally change it to a different setting with the settings widget that is by default on the first home page to the right.
works fine on mine yet not a feature i use....i just set it statically.
I find the auto-brightness to be too dim for my liking. It would be great if you could adjust the overall brightness while still maintaining the automatic scaling.
Turns out it does work, it just need to be *really* bright to make it change.
It doesn't change really at all in my office between switching the lights on and off (even though that's a really big change in light levels to me). However, if i go outside, it does get brighter.
As you say though, it does seem to be set a bit low (hence it not brightening up when my office lights are turned on I guess).
If I enable auto-brightness on mine, it seems to constantly vary the brightness in my office. It's annoying as crap and I turned it off. Am I the only one?
It's probably taking a look at the available APIs to see if it's easy to write a quick app to do auto brightness with settings to be able to tweak it.
The auto-brightness feature changes constantly for me as well.
I 'm also having issues of the varying brightness when using auto-brightness -- even though the lighting in my environment has not changed and I avoid contact with the light sensor. It's VERY annoying.
I've since switched to using a static setting for the brightness.
auto brightness was one of the first things i turned off. it was way too dim for me
Not bright enough for me. Doesnt seem to change much.
I do see the variability occasionally. Most of the time it's stable, but it will take spells of shifting up and down repeatedly. Glad to know I'm not alone.
Auto bright annoyed me as well when I first got the phone. Then I realized where the sensor is (top left) and what it was responding to. Depending on where I'm sitting, what light sources are behind me, in front of me but reflecting off of me. It's usually just responding to a light source that's just withing view of its sensor. Also, my hand has shielded the sensor more than just a few times, confusing the sensor.
Now I leave auto bright on all the time, and it more often than not does a good job.
IMHO this is one of the few broken features on the phone. In continuous lighting it jumps from bright to dim to everything in between like a jack rabbit on speed. I still use it to save battery life but it pisses me off regularly.
am also having this problem. it constantly goes much brighter, and then, suddenly goes back to dim.. very annoying... however, the light sensor for calling works well... so, is it a software issue.. hope it gets google's attention and gets fixed in next update...
Bicster_ said:
If I enable auto-brightness on mine, it seems to constantly vary the brightness in my office. It's annoying as crap and I turned it off. Am I the only one?
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+1 so I also manually go between three on the widget
Note that the light sensor is under the glass on the front of the phone. Some cover-all cases cover this, and if you use one of these I assume your phone will remain on the dimmest setting.
In general, while indoors it will remain on the dimmest setting (for me anyway), but rise to the necessary full brightness when in sunlight.
w00yee said:
am also having this problem. it constantly goes much brighter, and then, suddenly goes back to dim.. very annoying... however, the light sensor for calling works well... so, is it a software issue.. hope it gets google's attention and gets fixed in next update...
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There are two sensors, one is a light sensor and the other is a proximity sensor to detect when you've taken the phone from your ear. I think you're referring to the second.
w00yee said:
am also having this problem. it constantly goes much brighter, and then, suddenly goes back to dim.. very annoying... however, the light sensor for calling works well... so, is it a software issue.. hope it gets google's attention and gets fixed in next update...
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+1 constant occiliation on dimmness levles under consistant light. It goes from way too dim, to just right then back dark again. I too hope that google will correct this with the next update. Hopefully the patch gets pushed soon, i'd like that extra memory
Damage may already be aware of this cause but i thought it was interesting as the cause of the backlight issue had never really been discussed in depth just the fact that it functions randomly. As i had just reassembled my Hero after cleaning the trackball i realized something when i turned off the light to see how bright my newly cleaned trackball was and i noticed the keys backlight came on when i turned off the lights! So i retested to make sure it wasn't a coincidence and sure enough lights go out, keys backlight comes on and stays on like normal while touching the screen. On 1.5 the keys backlight would come on regardless of the level of light around u. So somehow in these new 2.1 roms the backlight for the keys is linked to the light sensor. As for the trackball that's a completely different story.
That is kind of a cool idea. If that is how it works on the official update.
The keyboard backlight and the backlight of the capacitive buttons is controlled by the light sensor on the phone. It my living room at the moment. The system can't decide whether the backlight should be on or off. It's really ****ing annoying. It turns on then off again about three times per sentence so far!
Why can't it just be ON when the screen is on and OFF when the screen is off? I don't even have automatic brightness on. The tiny amount of power wasted when your in bright light would be worth it.
I've also seen the keyboard backlight stay off at times when it was quite dim where I was; times when I really could have used it!
I don't understand how this sort of crappy behavior gets through HTC quality assurance testing. Don't they use the phones before just shipping them out?
EDIT: Oh, hey! Problem solved. I put a small piece of black electrical tape over the god damn light sensor. >.<
elusivebyte said:
The keyboard backlight and the backlight of the capacitive buttons is controlled by the light sensor on the phone. It my living room at the moment. The system can't decide whether the backlight should be on or off. It's really ****ing annoying. It turns on then off again about three times per sentence so far!
Why can't it just be ON when the screen is on and OFF when the screen is off? I don't even have automatic brightness on. The tiny amount of power wasted when your in bright light would be worth it.
I've also seen the keyboard backlight stay off at times when it was quite dim where I was; times when I really could have used it!
I don't understand how this sort of crappy behavior gets through HTC quality assurance testing. Don't they use the phones before just shipping them out?
EDIT: Oh, hey! Problem solved. I put a small piece of black electrical tape over the god damn light sensor. >.
Lol @ tape. But I cant really say anything about the hk light because I dont use it alot but, there was an app that was for rooted g1 that could controll the backlight of the keyboard. Maybe when the g2 is rooted we will have some better settings or an on off controller
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elusivebyte said:
The keyboard backlight and the backlight of the capacitive buttons is controlled by the light sensor on the phone. It my living room at the moment. The system can't decide whether the backlight should be on or off. It's really ****ing annoying. It turns on then off again about three times per sentence so far!
Why can't it just be ON when the screen is on and OFF when the screen is off? I don't even have automatic brightness on. The tiny amount of power wasted when your in bright light would be worth it.
I've also seen the keyboard backlight stay off at times when it was quite dim where I was; times when I really could have used it!
I don't understand how this sort of crappy behavior gets through HTC quality assurance testing. Don't they use the phones before just shipping them out?
EDIT: Oh, hey! Problem solved. I put a small piece of black electrical tape over the god damn light sensor. >.<
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I have that same issue (my touch buttons) go crazy when I use the device, they act like the notification light, and I noticed that about the keyboard too...
The phone has a **** light sensor overall... I can be in a dark room and the phone would be bright as shyt, conversely if I'm near a bright light, the screen doesn't get bright enough.
Hopefully these problems won't exist on my replacement unit.
It's not the sensor, it's the software. Nexus One had all the same problems until CyanogenMod fixed 'em. Boom, working auto setting, working backlight on capacitive buttons.
Stock 2.2.1 AFAIK still has the same issues.
The backlight on my keyboard stopped working the 5th day I had the phone. The light sensor does suck. I was on a call outside and the screen kept coming on. My cheek kept activating buttons on the screen while on a call. Not good. I'm 12 days into my 30 day remorse period. I'm not sure if I'm sending this one back for a replacement or just calling it a day altogether...
30 or 20 days
lukelasmf said:
The backlight on my keyboard stopped working the 5th day I had the phone. The light sensor does suck. I was on a call outside and the screen kept coming on. My cheek kept activating buttons on the screen while on a call. Not good. I'm 12 days into my 30 day remorse period. I'm not sure if I'm sending this one back for a replacement or just calling it a day altogether...
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How did you get 30 days remorse? I was told it's 20 days when buying directly from tmobile website.