Is iOS Grayscale The Newest iPhone Battery Saving Trick?
Last updated on January 10th, 2015 at 06:44 pm
Posted in TILs by Tyrone on October 23, 2014
iPhone Grayscale Battery Usage.
Now, unless you’re a retro addict, you might wonder who would use Grayscale on its iOS device? A decent answer would be that it could help users with visual impairments, such as those with color blindness or color deficiency.
If you’re not a new iOS user you must already be aware of the Invert Colors trick. Apple qualifies both settings as Accessibility features, which means that in the manufacturers opinion, the features have the role to improve user experience.
In this case, isn’t Grayscale the latest iPhone battery saving trick on the web? Sadly, the answer is NO! Although this black-and-white like feature is available for some time for Android devices, and its even used by Samsung as a battery saving setting, the trick is not working for iOS devices.
Why Isn’t Grayscale Saving iPhone Battery Life?
That’s because this new feature helps a smartphone’s screen use less battery power when the display is made out of OLEDs. Currently all iOS devices use LCD/LED-based technology to light-up the screen. In this case there is no major power saving possible. With OLED displays, each pixel has controlled lighting (has it’s own switch) while, those with LED run on screen-wide lighting that flows through all pixels at once. This is why with LED technology there is no difference in terms of power consumption if the display shows 2 or more colors.
Grayscale ON and OFF setting.
You can make your iPhone’s screen display only black-and-white colors by taping on Settings, entering General, hitting Accessibility and using the Grayscale ON/OFF knob. To convince yourself, if Grayscale can save battery life or not, you can use your iOS device with the feature ON during a full battery cycle and compare it with a full cycle in normal mode. Use the Battery Usage app to compare results. Indeed, you might end up with better results when using Grayscale, but that’s only because your eyes will start to hurt and your iPhone experience will be less pleasant, thus making you use it less often. A personalized Background App Refresh setup will help much more if you need to prolong usage!
iOS Grayscale shortcut.
If you’re visually impaired, or simply a fan of black-and-white here are some more good news. Use this simple trick to set up a Home button shortcut for activating Grayscale. In the same Accessibility menu scroll down for ‘Accessibility Shortcut’. Choose Grayscale and you can enable or disable this feature by triple-pressing your iPhone’s Home button. Note, that this shortcut can support multiple seclections, meaning that you can opt for both Grayscale and Invert Colors options. When you perform the shortcut, a small menu will slide up from the bottom of your screen and you’ll be asked to pick which feature you wish to activate.
Grayscale and Invert Colors
For the ultimate experience you can activate both features in the same time. The result, your iPhone will display a high-contrast version of the black-and-white screen! Try it out and let us know your thoughts. Do you find any other application for Grayscale? Comment and enlighten us too! ;)
