[Q] physical keyboard issues - G2 and Desire Z General

does anyone else get an issue that the G2's backlight for the physical keyboard and capacative buttons have absolutly no idea when to be on and when to be off. I can be in a fully lit room and have the backlight on for no reason at all. is there any way to fix this? it gets very annoying very quickly.

It's a problem with the light sensor, but I think it can be corrected with software. The sensor seems to reflect differences in brightness really well, but the software tends to set everything to levels appropriate for brighter conditions. This leads to full screen brightness and no key backlighting even under dim interior lighting conditions.

my screen is SUPER Bright regardless of ambient light (in automode) I rely on the manual settings.
and yes I do have the same problem ... even on my second g2.

Same here. My backlight and softkeys go on and off randomly while in bright light and checking the time while waking up briefly during the night is painful because it is always extra bright.
Sent from my T-Mobile G2 using XDA App

thanks swags. hoping for a software update soon. its really annoying. also is it normal that i get this issue even without auto brightness

Related

Auto screen brightness doesn't work?

When I have my nexus one set to automatically adjust brightness, it doesn't seem to do anything.
I can move it between dark and bright environments and the screen brightness doesn't seem to change at all. Am I missing something or is this feature not working on my phone?
It works fine with mine. I just clicked auto in the brightness setting. Make sure you didn't accidentally change it to a different setting with the settings widget that is by default on the first home page to the right.
works fine on mine yet not a feature i use....i just set it statically.
I find the auto-brightness to be too dim for my liking. It would be great if you could adjust the overall brightness while still maintaining the automatic scaling.
Turns out it does work, it just need to be *really* bright to make it change.
It doesn't change really at all in my office between switching the lights on and off (even though that's a really big change in light levels to me). However, if i go outside, it does get brighter.
As you say though, it does seem to be set a bit low (hence it not brightening up when my office lights are turned on I guess).
If I enable auto-brightness on mine, it seems to constantly vary the brightness in my office. It's annoying as crap and I turned it off. Am I the only one?
It's probably taking a look at the available APIs to see if it's easy to write a quick app to do auto brightness with settings to be able to tweak it.
The auto-brightness feature changes constantly for me as well.
I 'm also having issues of the varying brightness when using auto-brightness -- even though the lighting in my environment has not changed and I avoid contact with the light sensor. It's VERY annoying.
I've since switched to using a static setting for the brightness.
auto brightness was one of the first things i turned off. it was way too dim for me
Not bright enough for me. Doesnt seem to change much.
I do see the variability occasionally. Most of the time it's stable, but it will take spells of shifting up and down repeatedly. Glad to know I'm not alone.
Auto bright annoyed me as well when I first got the phone. Then I realized where the sensor is (top left) and what it was responding to. Depending on where I'm sitting, what light sources are behind me, in front of me but reflecting off of me. It's usually just responding to a light source that's just withing view of its sensor. Also, my hand has shielded the sensor more than just a few times, confusing the sensor.
Now I leave auto bright on all the time, and it more often than not does a good job.
IMHO this is one of the few broken features on the phone. In continuous lighting it jumps from bright to dim to everything in between like a jack rabbit on speed. I still use it to save battery life but it pisses me off regularly.
am also having this problem. it constantly goes much brighter, and then, suddenly goes back to dim.. very annoying... however, the light sensor for calling works well... so, is it a software issue.. hope it gets google's attention and gets fixed in next update...
Bicster_ said:
If I enable auto-brightness on mine, it seems to constantly vary the brightness in my office. It's annoying as crap and I turned it off. Am I the only one?
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+1 so I also manually go between three on the widget
Note that the light sensor is under the glass on the front of the phone. Some cover-all cases cover this, and if you use one of these I assume your phone will remain on the dimmest setting.
In general, while indoors it will remain on the dimmest setting (for me anyway), but rise to the necessary full brightness when in sunlight.
w00yee said:
am also having this problem. it constantly goes much brighter, and then, suddenly goes back to dim.. very annoying... however, the light sensor for calling works well... so, is it a software issue.. hope it gets google's attention and gets fixed in next update...
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Click to collapse
There are two sensors, one is a light sensor and the other is a proximity sensor to detect when you've taken the phone from your ear. I think you're referring to the second.
w00yee said:
am also having this problem. it constantly goes much brighter, and then, suddenly goes back to dim.. very annoying... however, the light sensor for calling works well... so, is it a software issue.. hope it gets google's attention and gets fixed in next update...
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Click to collapse
+1 constant occiliation on dimmness levles under consistant light. It goes from way too dim, to just right then back dark again. I too hope that google will correct this with the next update. Hopefully the patch gets pushed soon, i'd like that extra memory

Backlight for touch-keys

Does anyone know how backlight is suppose to work for Home, Menu, Back and Search keys? Is it suppose to stay on as long as the screen backlight stays on or is it certain amount of time? What triggers them to come on- key press, screen touch, trackpad touch or all of the above? Mine don't seem to follow any rhyme or reason, at least I couldn't trace a pattern. I know that I was messing around with the phone last night in the dark and they would come on and go off as they pleased. Does light sensor have anything to do with it? Please sound off your findings and ideas.
Thanks!
Mine don't seem to follow any rhyme or reason either - it's a bit maddening. And the same goes for the backlight of the physical keyboard (sometimes it comes on, sometimes it doesn't - no telling why), and also the automatic adjustment of brightness (i use the phone for a minute and suddenly it gets super-bright).
Hopefully these are all just bugs that will be fixed with an OTA update, but it is weird and I'm glad to know it's not just my unit since I don't want to replace it (I got a solid hinge - good stuff!).
I think I figured it out. Backlight for touch keys is controlled by light sensor and also has a timer (few seconds), so if it's bright enough outside - they will not even come on. If it's dark - they come on and stay on for certain time then go off untill you press one of them again.
Now, the other thing that I'm noticing is that my haptic feedback is not working when pressing one of those buttons or long-pressing the screen. Anyone else has that problem?
I have used my phone primarily in the dark. All my lights are always on (when the screen is) and the auto-brightness is too bright. If I turn brightness to minimum, the always on lights are way too bright compared to the screen. I really wish the designers had tried to use this phone in the dark (laying in bed) and realized the auto-brightness and lights are too bright in pitch-dark!
Also I am getting real sick of rotation. On my G1 I could disable it completely unless the keyboard was out. I like to lay in bed or on a couch and use my phone sideways, but not rotated. This seems impossible to do on the G2. Disabling rotation doesn't do anything for 3rd party apps or even GMail for that matter. For some reason this was not the case on the G1.
It will be hard to go back to the G1's one-second+ lag after every press and the incredibly slow loading webpages now that I have experienced the G2, but there are too many really annoying problems, so I think it is getting sent back.
if you have your backlight set to automatic... it will cut on only if the room is dark... check your backlight settings
It's an issue with the way android uses the light sensor. It's very poorly coded.

Keyboard Light

Hi all,
I was wondering if there was a way to force the keyboard keys to stay lit up until you close it. It seems to be cutting out mid type.
Thanks.
It turns off when you it's bright enough in the surrounding area. You can flash cyanogenmod and set all the brightness settings.
Thanks,
I guess I was hoping to be able to control this manually without having to flash a different rom.
At this time its not possible to control it manually from stock froyo. Maybe in gingerbread?
Sent from my T-Mobile G2 running Cyanogenmod.
do you have it set to automatic brightness? I noticed my keyboard turning on and off while typing and the screen dimmed and brightened with it. Turned off the auto brightness and hasn't done it since.
dietotherhythm said:
do you have it set to automatic brightness? I noticed my keyboard turning on and off while typing and the screen dimmed and brightened with it. Turned off the auto brightness and hasn't done it since.
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Click to collapse
Turning off the auto brightness hasn't made any difference to me on my DZ. The backlight for the keyboard and capacative buttons seems to turn off and on quite often for no apparent reason (badly calibrated light sensor ?).
has anyone tried covering up the light sensor with a sticker or something? lol idk
daaango said:
has anyone tried covering up the light sensor with a sticker or something? lol idk
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Click to collapse
That would certainly work, you can put your finger over it and show how it's the light sensor doing it. Probably not the best long term solution though

Auto brightness only brightens, never dims

I noticed that the brightness only brightens but never dims back in automatic brightness display setting. I can reproduce this easy with turning the lamp on my desk on and off. It only goes back to the lower brightness if turning the screen off and on again.
Noticed this too but seems to only occur when I use a widget to toggle between Auto and 100%.
If I leave the setting in Auto from within settings then it seems to work. Brightness widgets seem to break the auto functionality.
Hmm, I don't use a brightness widget. The light of the softbuttons go on if I cover the light sensor, but the screens stays in high brightness.
Strahlenkanone said:
Hmm, I don't use a brightness widget. The light of the softbuttons go on if I cover the light sensor, but the screens stays in high brightness.
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Click to collapse
Must be an all around bug then. If you turn the Atrix off and back on then the auto brightness functionality is restored.
Strahlenkanone said:
I noticed that the brightness only brightens but never dims back in automatic brightness display setting. I can reproduce this easy with turning the lamp on my desk on and off. It only goes back to the lower brightness if turning the screen off and on again.
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Click to collapse
This must be an Android thing. My Atrix does the same thing, as did the Nexus One I had before. I've had several (high end) Nokia's that dimmed/brightened perfectly. After 5 seconds, they would brighten (or dim) accordingly. I was hoping Motorola was better at making phones than HTC (the KING of bad battery life). We ALL lose here. Our precious battery life is being drained by the poor execution of a simple function.
This is a stock android thing (problem). Custom ROMs can allow it to dim and change brightness smoothly rather than in discrete steps (Cyanogen).
That's what I thought. I found this free app called "esdimmer". It supposed to be for Galaxy phones, but it's somewhat working on my Atrix. Does this function work any better in Gingerbread?
Sent from my MB860 using XDA App
Well it's good to hear that it's a stock android problem and not the actual phone. I did find a way to get around this problem but it's very limited. You can get the screen to dim by first putting the phone into standby and then press the standby button once again (which gets you into the lock screen). You'll notice that the screen then dims (if coming from a well lit area/room to a darker one).

Do you experience brightness issue?

I've noticed weird brightness issue at Auto Brightness turned off and when I set it at full. It is actually going even brighter when is brighter outside and it's getting darker again when going into darker environment and it is making me crazy because firstly I don't want my battery to drain more when using brightness sensor and actually don't like the feeling of brightness going up and down that's why I TURNED OFF autobrightness. Could you reproduce the same behavior?
pok5 said:
I've noticed weird brightness issue at Auto Brightness turned off and when I set it at full. It is actually going even brighter when is brighter outside and it's getting darker again when going into darker environment and it is making me crazy because firstly I don't want my battery to drain more when using brightness sensor and actually don't like the feeling of brightness going up and down that's why I TURNED OFF autobrightness. Could you reproduce the same behavior?
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Click to collapse
Yes i have this when dark mode is turned on, Even with Auto brightness off it will still change the brightness when i am outside in the bright sun and it also changes the way the text appears adding sort of black lines on the edges of the letters (to give it more contrast ?). It's a feature not an issue i think it also doesn't happen indoors even when lights change. For some reason it only happens when it's very bright outside.
FairTraxx said:
Yes i have this when dark mode is turned on, Even with Auto brightness off it will still change the brightness when i am outside in the bright sun and it also changes the way the text appears adding sort of black lines on the edges of the letters (to give it more contrast ?). It's a feature not an issue i think it also doesn't happen indoors even when lights change. For some reason it only happens when it's very bright outside.
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Yeah, but every feature should have "turn off" button, but Xiaomi couldn't help it with forcing something on us as always...
Under Settings/Display/Contrast & colors try using either Increased contrast or Standard. NOT Automatic contrast.

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