How Dark Wallpapers and Themes Save Your Smartphone's Battery?

As we know, there are different types of screen comes with different smartphones. Ever since the invention of flat panel monitors and screens, it didn't matter what colour your pixels were, you'd still consume the same amount of power. However, AMOLED and Super AMOLED screens are different. They don't have one big back light; instead, each pixel makes its own light. Thus, a pixel displaying a dark color actually consumes less power than a pixel displaying a light color. Reader Steve performed a few tests to find out if this was actually true.



Steve explains: A full brightness white pixel uses 5.8 times more juice than a black pixel. That doesn't mean you could ever increase your battery life by 5.8 times. That's for 2 reasons. The first is that no one spends all day staring at a fully white screen and because no one would every want to switch to a fully black screen! The second is that the screen isn't the only thing using power. . .

Let's look first at changing wallpaper. I've got no idea what the brightness of the average wallpaper is so I'm just going to go with a 50% grey wallpaper for the purposes of this comparison. When the grey wallpaper is used the average pixel brightness is 47%. For the black wallpaper it's 15%. So by changing, I've reduced average pixel brightness by 32%. If I spent all day on the home screen I'd save . . . about 11%.

There is another technique to save the battery life. Many apps offer you the choice of using a standard black-on-white theme, or a white-on-black theme. Steve found that by switching that app's theme, he could save nearly 23% more battery when reading RSS feeds.

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