Database Users

Looking for a minimalist theme for Universal (VGA)

I'm fed up with the flashy effects and background picture/pattern nonsense of the WM5 default blue theme. I'm looking for something minimalist, that doesn't hog as much resources. Any ideas where to look for something like that?
Most downloadable themes I've seen have colorful backgrounds and shaded menubars etc. I don't need that crap. All I need is a black background, thin, single-coloured menubars and windowframes, no animations, you get the idea.

i have a Palm Vx i can sell you cheap

No, no, you don't understand. I like the technical features of the Universal. I love having the great screen for watching movies or browsing the web with Opera, or the Wi-Fi or the 3G for on-the move connectivity. It's all good. But it makes my heart cry to see all this potential crippled by the resource hogging OS that's running on it.

i understood what you meant, this was a joke.
i love this device as well, for precisely the reasons you mention, but to tell the truth i don't believe a "light-weight" skin would improve performance all that much, if at all.
it certainly is sluggish, and i wish it ran faster, but even so it's better than carrying a phone, an ipod and a camera around in my bag...

I think that acctually we should have white background to save more power. Black colour on TFT screens is created by put max power to pixels. White colour dotn consume more power that is needed to light a fluorescent tube in the display which is turn on anyway. just my 0.02$

nabuhonodozor said:
I think that acctually we should have white background to save more power. Black colour on TFT screens is created by put max power to pixels. White colour dotn consume more power that is needed to light a fluorescent tube in the display which is turn on anyway. just my 0.02$
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Are you sure about that? Isn't a white pixel getting max. power?

I am sure. In LCD screens, when turn on (not in some king of power saving mode) fluorescent lamp is always glowing so to get shades and dark colour You ll actually have to "cover" light with LCD pixel. For LCD crystals to block the light they must be applied with maximum power. So if You have whole white screen theres no crystall blocking light and screen consumes energy only to light fluorescent lamp. If You have dark picture lcd display have to draw more energy not only to light fluorescent lamp but also to max out energy to all pixels to block the light.

Here is the classic black today skin that I use. Its only 2kb and is extremely minimalist. Hope this helps!

@nabuhonodozor
The exact inverse of what you said is correct.
Basically, in order to achieve the WHITE colour the Red, Green and Blue elements need to be lit consequently needing MORE power than would be required to achieve the Black colour which wouldn't require any colour elements to be lit.
Hope this helps.
Q.

burn in?

The various apps like bedside, and the clock app included with the n1 allows users to keep their screen on all night long to use as a clock. i did some research and it appears that oleds are susceptable to burn in.
do you think using your n1 as a clock could result in burn in? or does the decreased brightness make this unlikely? ive been holding off on using my n1 as a clock until im sure its safe, and since its so new and oleds are so new there is very little information or problems that have surfaced yet.
any thoughts?

Theres a reason why after, I think 10 minutes, it goes to the "LED" displays that gets moved around the screen

bobtentpeg said:
Theres a reason why after, I think 10 minutes, it goes to the "LED" displays that gets moved around the screen
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mine doesnt do that

iamwhoamnot said:
mine doesnt do that
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That's how it works with the dock - that doesn't appear to be the behavior when just plugged in though.

Amoled screens have many advantages over other categories of display screens. Unlike Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) screens, these screens do not require backlight because of the self luminous diodes. And for that reason it consumes almost fifty percent less power than its counterparts. As such it is well suited for portable devices which operate on battery power. Amoled screens are comparatively cheaper and are ideal medium for large sized display screens. Further they are environment friendly as there is no problem like burn-in as in the case of plasma screens.
It says they do not have burn-in problems.

krohnjw said:
That's how it works with the dock - that doesn't appear to be the behavior when just plugged in though.
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Just tried it with mine and it works without the dock!
Pretty cool as well.
EDIT: Don't press the dim button and after a few minutes it goes black and green text.

nelson8403 said:
Amoled screens have many advantages over other categories of display screens. Unlike Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) screens, these screens do not require backlight because of the self luminous diodes. And for that reason it consumes almost fifty percent less power than its counterparts. As such it is well suited for portable devices which operate on battery power. Amoled screens are comparatively cheaper and are ideal medium for large sized display screens. Further they are environment friendly as there is no problem like burn-in as in the case of plasma screens.
It says they do not have burn-in problems.
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wait how does burn in effect environmental friendliness?
this is what i read
# Dynamic display efficiency. While you can write a few lines of static text with great efficiency, video requires more power than an LCD. OLEDs are more efficient for small graphics or text because they only consume power in the area where they are addressed.
# To date, the reliability has not come up to the levels of LCDs.
# It is particularly difficult to drive the blue colors where the luminance efficiency is very low. As a consequence, the lifetime is reduced, and burn-in is also an issue
source http://www.sharpsma.com/Page.aspx/americas/en/b3fad008-bf63-4e66-ab68-7a52cae8fa1e
anything even hinting that i could mess up my shiny new phone i cant ignore

iamwhoamnot said:
wait how does burn in effect environmental friendliness?
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Last longer so no need to bin them.
Pretty sure that's wrong and they do suffer burn in though.

I noticed when plugged in, it doesn't move when its on portrait mode, but landscape it does. I guess the portrait mode only moves round with the dock.
iamwhoamnot said:
mine doesnt do that
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stewart1988 said:
Just tried it with mine and it works without the dock!
Pretty cool as well.
EDIT: Don't press the dim button and after a few minutes it goes black and green text.
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Or you could just hold the dim button until it turns green on black

tontonHD said:
Or you could just hold the dim button until it turns green on black
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Holy crap, that's awesome! I never noticed that before. Good call.

so should i be warry of leaving the clock on over night on dim? i dont want to burn my pretty screen!

I leave mine on every night in my dock. Since the default clock moves the time around the display, and the rest is all black (off), then the chances of burning the display are slim.
Worst case, my screen gets burned-in in the next 30 days and it forces me to buy an HTC Desire on AT&T

tontonHD said:
Or you could just hold the dim button until it turns green on black
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Or dim it then hold the button

Rusty! said:
Or dim it then hold the button
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Cool! Didn't know that one.

AMOLED displays cant display true black...:Screen Discussion :...

As seen by the NoLED app over in the dev section, and in a few other places on the net, people are finding that when they display a black image on their amoled/samoled screens in a dark room there is still light emitted by the display. it is not truly black
I would like to know why!
One thing i hear is about image compression and signal noise causing the pixels to not display #000000 black and instead a variant of black/grey causing the pixel to become lit.
This problem is not an issue during the day, i can't tell the difference when my screen is displaying black or off. but what it does effect is battery life.
If the screen isn't powering down its pixels then it is not saving anywhere near as much power as it could do
Also
How happy are you with your display?
I knew about the pentile problem before buying, however i am not dissatisfied with the display at all. Infact if i did not read up about it i would not have realised there was anything different with the screen.
Text is clear and sharp, images are vibrant, and colours seem true with no issue of pink problems like the desire

looool, look at any lcd screen(tv whatsoever) and you don't have true black, because the backlight is on. Only the best LED LCD screens in TV world have FULL LED backlight that can dim the leds from parts of the screen that are fully black in the processed image.
take care

yup, if you take apart your LCD watch, phone, laptop or monitor
you'll see 2 layers, first layer the LCD/TFT/AMOLED/SAMOLED/etc whatever new technology screen you can think of name it here.
then the bottom layer is pretty much like a light bulb/white led/ccfl or whatever you want to call it to light up the first portion of the screen.
most devices you can control the 2 separate pieces separately via "screen" and "back light"
you'll noticed that usually on software options what specifically lets you control both indedpendly.

Eh.. Yes But the SGS hade OLED screen. So it should be able to turn pixels completly off. My guess is that each led has some very small current applied to it possibly to speed up response off screen.
But it come close to true blacks..
EDIT
OLED screen has NO backlight... Each pixel is an tiny led...
Sent from my GT-I9000 using XDA App

thanks for the heads up, that's good to know
i've yet to take apart a new SGS to figure out how the AMOLED displays works

You guys need educating on displays lol
oled screens have no backlight, thus no backlight bleed.
That means that this is a software issue, unless the screen not powering down completely is intentional

Software issue and nothing more.
Open up the calculator, drag down the numpad, hide the 2 stripes (status bar and numpad drag bar) in the top and bottom of the screen, and tell me if you see any lighting.
There's absolutely nothing.

there is still light emitted. cover up the top and bottom bar with your hands, go into a completely dark room then look into the center of the screen.
There is a uniform glow, just like when looking at a black image in the gallery or browser

It's actually more noticeable if you look AWAY. The peripheral area of your retina will be able to pick up a very feeble amount of light. Feeble, sure, but it's there nonetheless.

seriously, guys?

XQC said:
seriously, guys?
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The problem is that the way it is supposed to work is that if you display black, the screen shouldn't use any energy at all but it is and people can see it and so is using precious battery charge.
The issue is... that apps like noled which were going to display a red dot on the screen to let people know if they had mail waiting or whatever wouldnt use much power at all because they were displaying mainly a black screen but it isnt actually black and still using light so still chews through the power..
hope that made sense.. but that is why people are interested in it..

Ok, I missed the battery part, sorry If so, it is indeed an annoyance...
I thought people were seriously complaining about image quality.

I have the Samsung wave and it uses the same screen technology and I can tell that it does not have true blacks pixels are still lit, I can easily tell that its on and totally off there is a very faint trace amount of light produced..

Since I first got this device and turned it on I have been impressed with the display. I am kind of partial to AMOLED diplays and am, thus, a bit biased. What surprised me was that it "appeared" sharper than the display on the Nexus One. Considering it is slightly larger and at the same resolution I just assumed that it wasn't using the PenTile arrangement - yet it appears that it does in fact use the same subpixel arrangement as the screen on the Nexus One. My point is... now I've forgotten my point. Basically that I am more than satisfied with this display.
As far as the black issue is concerned I have no idea. There must be some reason considering that was one of the supposed strengths of this technology (i.e. true blacks and lower power consumption).
El Mono

wait so why would you display an image if you want to save battery?
really
How many of you have measured how much power is being used up when the display is displaying a true black image(measured with multimeter, or other measuring device)
How many of you have made sure that the glow is not caused by a residual charge in the display?
How many of you know how much time it takes for the "glow" to leave an OLED panel when power is not being applied?
just some food for thought

The thing is, amoled screens were advertised as having true blacks and having the pixels off when displaying black. this is clearly not the case

It's not an issue with the technology. The screen doesn't have a back lighting panel, so i think it's more of a problem of what shade is default defined as "black" in the system, or something with any current running through the screen.

Well considering the screen doesn't turn off when displaying a 100% black bitmap image, its safe to say that the say that the pixels NEVER turn themselves off during use when displaying black

Could be the screen isn't calibrated properly, or they lied to us about the tech(wouldn't be the first time).

While its not "true black" it is defenently beyond what any backlit screentype can do regarding blacks.
Except perhaps for the retina display forged by god himself
But I agree that if Samsung states True black then it should be able to do that.
Sent from my GT-I9000 using XDA App

Battery

On LCD screens (as our hd2) white uses LESS power.
On AMOLED screens (omnia 7) white uses MORE power.
HD2's a white background is best for conserving and attaining maximum battery life.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=fact-or-fiction-black-is

marek1 said:
On LCD screens (as our hd2) white uses LESS power.
On AMOLED screens (omnia 7) white uses MORE power.
HD2's a white background is best for conserving and attaining maximum battery life.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=fact-or-fiction-black-is
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Thanks, this i checked just 2days before one day i kept backgroud light and dark which differs in battery backup of 2hours(more in white) , this i checked because while googling i came to know that dark colors accents best for battery ,so in that test this is a part, anyway i came to know the exact reason behind that . thanks

By switching your HD2 screen to completely white you would save about 3% of your battery. You can't change your HD2 screen to completely white as the live tiles cover about 2/3's of your screen. So by switching to a white background you would save only about 1% of your battery.

Too fast.....
mickfarr said:
By switching your HD2 screen to completely white you would save about 3% of your battery. You can't change your HD2 screen to completely white as the live tiles cover about 2/3's of your screen. So by switching to a white background you would save only about 1% of your battery.
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You're assuming different colours use the same amount of energy as black, just as most people assumed a black screen uses less than a white one. Tch Tch Tch.
Does anybody want to do a scientific comparison of the energy consumptions of differently coloured tiles on black and white screens respectively??

stepthehen said:
You're assuming different colours use the same amount of energy as black, just as most people assumed a black screen uses less than a white one. Tch Tch Tch.
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You're wrong in your assumption, you don't compare apples and oranges. I'm comparing two identical phones, the only difference is one is using a black background and the other is using a white background.
Also I said by switching your background from black to white, I didn't mention switch any themes or anything else.

did anybody catch the word "backlight" the screen its self, ie, what is displayed isnt really an issue, the backlight sits behind the LCD screen, much the same way as it does on a TV or a laptop, for that reason you may have noticed that it is impossible for an LCD screen to display a black screen, it cant because it has a light behind it and the mask from the LCD panel comes out gray or washed out black.
Anyhow, any difference in the power consumption will be either down to the brightness settings or how much activity is on the LCD screen. more changes would equal more power, black has a single consistant change white does not have any as such, but as pointed out, the tile page will always be covered in something and thus would never be completely white. there may well be a difference between different colours/black in terms of powerusage but compared to the VERY BRIGHT backlight it would be tiny amounts of difference
in short, turn the brightness down and save a meaningful amount of power. fiddle with the colours and you could probably count the number of min savd on your hands
Statement from the university of the bleeding obvious.

[Q] Note 3 N 9005 16Gb version: The back light of the screen can bee seen!

Well, I actually noticed it with my Samsung Galaxy Note 3 16Gb N 9005 version.
When I go into settings and open "Accounts" or when I hold the home button to see apps running, I can see the back light on the lower half of the screen. Well, I can see the back lights because the background is black. Whether I'm using it the screen with 100% brightness or less possible, it's the same.
However, when I'm viewing dark pictures or gallery or many other parts that has a black or dark background I can't see the back light. Unfortunately I don't have a picture of it cause I don't own any other camera than my phone to show it to you.
Well, I just wanted to know if it's actually normal to see the back light on the screen as I explained above or is it that my device is a defect one or is there some sort of setting that can change it.
My friend has the N9000 but I can't see the back light on his screen. I'm a little worried.
Thank you in advance for your replies and help!

I've got the 16GB N9005 as well. The screen doesn't have perfectly dark blacks.

nakedtime said:
I've got the 16GB N9005 as well. The screen doesn't have perfectly dark blacks.
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You mean you also experience the back light on some dark background like I've just described?

RhysC24 said:
You mean you also experience the back light on some dark background like I've just described?
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Correct. I was under the impression this was unavoidable as it is the lcd reflecting the backlight.
Maybe I didn't understand your question.

nakedtime said:
Correct. I was under the impression this was unavoidable as it is the lcd reflecting the backlight.
Maybe I didn't understand your question.
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Thank god, I thought my device was a defect one!
I hope it can just be fixed with an update!

Does the 16gb version have an lcd panel ?
Sent from my SM-N9005 using XDA Premium 4 mobile app

You have a defective screen.
AMOLED displays don't even have a backlight, individual pixels themselves lightup when needed and go off when it's black.
Unless the 16GB version has an LCD display - which I am not aware of.

16GB? Really?

Skander1998 said:
You have a defective screen.
AMOLED displays don't even have a backlight, individual pixels themselves lightup when needed and go off when it's black.
Unless the 16GB version has an LCD display - which I am not aware of.
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Well, I don't know if it's the back light actually. However when I go into settings and then account on the lower half of the screen, I can see the white lights behind the screen. It also apply when I hold the home button to see active apps I can see the same white light like on the lower half of the screen. Normally, since the default background is in black or dark grey it is noticeable.However, the weird part is when I go into gallery which also has the black background, it doesn't appear there! It's full black and I don't see the white like stuff.
Normally it is more visible when I'm in a dark room, mostly at night!
It's not LCD, it's Super Amoled just like the other!