Extreme test shows OLED iPhone X with 'dark mode' saves nearly 60% battery over 3 hours

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Comments

  • Reply 21 of 30
    macguimacgui Posts: 2,350member
    Bacillus3 said:
    What a myiad of options, tradeoffs, compromises, functionanomalities. While things could have just worked with a slightly thicker iPhone...
    Yes. I wish Apple has stopped working towards razor-thin phones a couple of generations back. Keeping the phone at 5s thickness and using the thickest battery possible would give much better battery life without all the hoops.

    The hoops are handy in extremis, but a bigger battery in a thicker phone would have been so easy to do.
    waverboy
  • Reply 22 of 30
    Agreed 100%.  I'd gladly sacrifice a bit of thinness for more battery life.

    When the hell are we supposed to get our graphene batteries that last for days and charge in fifteen minutes???
  • Reply 23 of 30
    Bacillus3 said:
    What a myiad of options, tradeoffs, compromises, functionanomalities. While things could have just worked with a slightly thicker iPhone...
    What a miss of the point entirely.  It's simply how to get additional battery life in a way that can't be done with previous iPhones.  If they made the iPhone X 3 times as thick, you would *still* get massively more battery life, if you chose to, by implementing a few simple tricks.  
    And the current iPhone X battery life is just fine without knowing any of this.
  • Reply 24 of 30
    Yeah, that wonderful OLED with it's brilliant colors has another big advantage - turning all those colors OFF and using a black background for everything to save battery is supposed to leave us excited? The highly vaunted iPhone X - works best in B&W?

    Hey, I heard you get the best battery life of all by turning the phone completely off!
  • Reply 25 of 30
    I have mine set to toggle dark mode by triple clicking the power button on right hand side, makes it really easy switch it off and on
    fastasleep
  • Reply 26 of 30
    I wish there was a true ‘dark theme’ where only text was reversed (perhaps using a pale grey instead of white for the text) and objects such as emoji and indicators (such as the send button) stayed the original colours. Having blue emoji and orange indicators (what we get with Smart Invert) is garish. 
    caladanian
  • Reply 27 of 30
    eriamjh said:
    Kuyangkoh said:
    I don’t care, i carry battery pack.....i want a nice oled screen that’s why i paid premium for it.....YES
    Exactly.  The usage techniques must not be sacrificed for battery life.  Might as well just tell people to use their phones less.  

    However, it's a nice tool for those days when you may not be able to charge.  

    What does ios's low power mode do on iPhone X? 
    Doesn't do anything different. 

    Mail fetch, Hey Siri, background app refresh, automatic downloads, and some visual effects are reduced or turned off. 
    Don't forget, perhaps most importantly, the CPU clock frequency is reduced (I get geekbench of 2693 core single in low power mode vs 4141 normally).  An A11 in clock reduced mode is still seemingly pretty fast!
  • Reply 28 of 30
    And it could make the battery life worse (if only you tested a little further to disclose a full experience on how many people will use the phone)
    And how can you call surfing the web “exteeem tests”?

    Well as some mentioned not all all’s are optimized for this yet. Not optimized apps aside, I was only testing with apps that have been updated to be fair to the hardware.
    I’ve been using invert colors for nights with migraines from sensitivity to light for years on multiple devices. 
    So when I got the iPhone X I figured I would try this smart invert. I understand the OLED technology and how no color (black) is using no power. I know on my Samsung galaxy 4 I would use a black background for the same reason in increase battery life, and also in the original Apple Watch. Now I have the Serries 3 and get 2.5 days because I’m so used to using the Watch as the 2 year old original watch.

    My experience is mixed even some optimized apps for this feature don’t work the best. In fact it can make the battery life worse with some of the testing I did.
    Why did I come back to AI after being gone for 3 years, I should have know things are still the same with half tast tests and fast to reported on things for views and ad revenue. Leaving out the other side,with readers wondering why the didn’t get the same results just because it was not tested fully. Oh, and biased towards Apple of course so some reviews can’t be taken seriously and need to keep this in mind, Seems like nothing has changed. 

    Well since I’m reply for the one I’ll share my experience and explain how this could also make your battery life worse.
    Let’s take playing YouTube videos as an example. The app is updated and can determine a black background for comments and description, while still keeping thumbnails and videos playing in normal colors. Better then the old invert colors that would do negative coloring of videos also. But after about 40 minutes of videos I noticed mt phone was getting hot, hotter then if I was to encode a 1 hour long 4K Video thah I did for a test.
    I believe with web surfing using Firefox (recetlty update also)and safari, or emails this is fine.
    But for apps thah have to actively have black parts like comments, and colored parts for videos playing it uses a lot of processor power to try and determine what should be dark and what should remain normal color. 
    With the processor getting hot, or maybe it was the GPU, or both? Either way I saw a fast drop on the battery percentage and they were working hard.

    So use this cautiously, it won’t always save you battery life and could make it worse like it did in my testing.
    like I said, emails, browsing, text, probably would be good and increase battery life. Active things changing with a mix of dark and normal colors together like videos apps, YouTube, Hulu, Netflix, and probably games would just end up making it worse. This will also include playing videos in Safari or Firefox.

    Well I hope this helps some so realize it may nit be the best upturn under some use case scenarios.
    Thank you,
    Scott
    AKA Gadget Review Videos

  • Reply 29 of 30
    Low power mode should optionally enable these settings automatically as well.
  • Reply 30 of 30
    flydog said:
    MplsP said:
    Great example of how simply modifying the display a bit can dramatically change battery consumption. Apple should build this into iOS. There are many people who would take advantage of it.
    it IS built into iOS as the article plainly states. 
    The idea is for Apple to include these techniques in their Low Power Mode (at least as an option), so users won't have to adjust everything ,annually.
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