This "everything or nothing" implementation suffers from a couple of problems. For one thing, it requires the press of a button every time you want to know some little detail like the battery status, the signal strength, or the time. Secondly, the glaring bright display can be jolting in the dark confines of someplace place like a movie theater.
Nokia has tried to work around this issue by displaying monochromatic status indicators on the display even with the backlight turned off in their earlier phones. However, since it didn't work in very dark or very bright lighting conditions, they've stopped using this method on more recent models.
Sony Ericsson deals with this by activating the backlight at a much lower brightness to display the status indicators when a button is pressed. This method works well for the most part, but it still does require that press of an extra button.
If a recent patent filing by Apple, the company details how status indication could be achieved on an iPhone without having to keep the display powered on the whole time or necessitating the press of a button.
Credited to an Apple engineer by the name of Michael Rosenblatt, the patent describes , one stacked on top of the other. The light source immediately below the display would be the bright, primary one and would itself be placed over a low-powered source that emits very faint light.
Apparently, the secondary light source could then be made to pass light through several transparent or semi-transparent areas on the main lighting source, thus emerging as faintly lit, distinct status icons on the screen, even when the phone is in sleep mode. The secondary light source could then be used to create a blinking effect or something resembling the pulsing behaviour of the sleep indicator on Macs.
I'm no engineer, of course, so the exact details of how this might work are a bit unclear to me, but it sounds like a pretty clever idea. Since it requires changes to the hardware, don't expect to see it enabled via a software update, if ever. Apple has a lengthy history of patenting ideas and technologies that never actually make it into the hands of consumers.
That Apple is looking into ways to add more status indicators to iPhone is certainly good news though. One way they could add them on the software level even to current iPhones is to have some more icons in the status bar to reflect important information like unread email and SMS text messages or missed calls. That would eliminate the need to unlock the phone or scroll to a different Home screen to find these details and make the phone a tad more accessible.
[via ]