Gadgetory

hey guys it's Joe pocketnow.com remember a while back I wrote an article about a developer over at xda-developers comm that had postulated an idea about turning off one particular color set in the LCD panel so we used our Android phones well back then it was just a cool idea and I gave you some screenshots today I want to show you not only has how that's been implemented but also a widget that lets you do it really quickly and I'll talk about some things that are cool and some things that are not so cool about this method and how to go about doing it let's go take a look okay so what I've done here is this is my Nexus One it is running CyanogenMod version 6.0 rc2 which is a Froyo build but it's got these extra bits in it so I've launched the the settings here let me go back one step I've launched the phone settings and then all the way down to the bottom is this CyanogenMod setting so I'm gonna go in there and that's where you're not you'll notice in the user interface section that we have render effect now in render effect right now we have none it's using the default rendering mode let's change that to red and immediately you can see that it's changed the entire interface over to this monochrome red and it's still very usable you know I can come in here I can still identify what all of my apps are looking at my icons I can still read my email it's still very very usable it's just a monochrome read now this comes in really really handy ok let me see if I can adjust the camera here a little bit to let you see a little bit closer I don't know how that's going to come across but looking at it on screen it looks just like the normal screen just red and it's kind of cool if you're at all used to doing anything outside at night or even inside at night you know that after your eyes have been accustomed to the dark if you turn on your phone even for an instant that white light just blinds you it gives you what's called night - so to preserve your night vision you can use red now red is a lot kinder on the eyes and you can turn on your phone look at it do whatever you need to and then turn it off and you still have good night vision so that's really cool let's go back into the settings here so we'll go back home go back into settings back down to CyanogenMod settings user interface and render effect let's go to terminal now this one is just like the old fashioned command prompt terminals you'll still see those around in terminal apps and whatnot where it's green text on a black background not all that useful just for around the town for for doing anything it's not as useful like the red is for preserving your your night vision but let me show you a couple others and then I'll tell you why these are really kind of cool here's a kind of a dark blue and it looks a lot lighter on the camera screen than it does down here this is almost a purple it's going and look at another one we'll look at amber Amber's kind of got a yellow hue to it it's a lot more mustardy on my phone than what I've seen on the camera salmon kind of a dark dull grayish pink and then fuchsia now why might these be important well right now it's just kind of cool but if you are someone who has color blindness where you cannot see a particular color or colors like a vast majority of a lot a majority but a very good number of males a lot of them have color blindness now I'm lucky I don't have color blindness but here's one aspect where I think this could really come in play let me go ahead and switch this back to no render effect and then I want to go back over here out of CyanogenMod settings to just the regular settings so here we are we're looking at this and we have something down here called accessibility now in accessibility we've got sound back talk back kickback and yada yada yada so we've got a whole bunch of stuff that we can turn on that will help us if we have whatever disabilities to be able to use these phones now one thing that this doesn't do is anything regarding colorblindness you just can have to live with the phone now using some of these render effects you might as a colorblind male or the few colorblind females that are out there you might be able to see the phone better using one of these render effects now another thing the render effects do because you're using less pixels you're actually not using the green which are two sub pixels there are two green sub pixels through every pixel and one blue sub pixel to every pixel you're only using the red sub pixel you're saving all that power so effectively you're turning off all of your green in your blue and only using the red which is the most color or most power efficient color on the phone to display what you want to look at so you're saving an awful lot of energy by not displaying the full color set so I mean that's one use and whether or not you know you can do that whether or not you can live with having it all in red for example is really up to you but it's neat that you can do it but a colorblind individual might get a better user experience by going in and choosing one of these render effects so I'd really like to see Google incorporate this or something like it into the accessibility options that's built into the phone specifically to help colorblind individuals so I would like to know if you're a colorblind which one of those and I know this is just a phone shot through a camera you're looking at on a monitor so there's a lot of variables involved but which one of these looked best to you or did any of them look good the the red the green the blue the amber the salmon or the fuchsia in fact if you've got CyanogenMod 6rc 2 on your phone and can try this out I would like to know which one works best for you and then I'd also like to know what type of colorblindness you have so and I'm sorry I don't know an awful lot about colorblindness to identify them but if you are a red-green colorblind person which one of these works best for you or none of the above if you've got a different type of colorblindness let us know what that is and let us know what render effect works best for you or if none of them did and if there are any engineers out there from Google watching I'd also be interested to hear from you to see if this is something that you might be interested in taking up the flagpole and seeing if some of the executives at Google would like to incorporate this into the stock Android build so kind of interesting kind of neat and something that you just really need to see on your phone to get an idea of I hope I've shown you here kind of a rough idea please if you have any comments go ahead and leave those below if you liked the video if you liked the concept of different color schemes for colorblindness using the LCD itself go ahead and give this video a thumbs up subscribe to our video channel in case you have not done so already and yes I know that means you yeah yeah you right there click the subscribe button okay good deal Thanks all right now everybody else head on over to pocketnow.com check out all of the latest articles that we have running so showing off the render of X capabilities of the phone with some possible uses practical uses for them I'm Joe for pocketnow.com