Tuesday, July 19, 2011

AMOLED Screens Will Change the Future of UI Design

The latest Super AMOLED Plus screen such as the one featured in the new Samsung Galaxy S II will begin having a real impact on UI design.

Why is that? you ask.

The latest generation of AMOLED screen use little to no power when displaying black pixels.  This means that on a mobile devices it is much more power efficient to use black pixels as much as possible.  I think this will mean that in the coming years mobile devices will increasingly use darker UIs in order to increase the battery life of their devices.  Android seems to have already made the decision to have black backgrounds on their UI quite a while ago and it makes me wonder whether this choice was purely aesthetic or a very far sighted engineering decision based on the likelihood that in future mobile screens would have 0 power black pixels.

Does this mean we could see a revision of the rather light iOS UI in the coming years to a more efficient and stern black based UI?  Probably not,  but it is interesting that the latest Meego builds for the N900 also use a light coloured theme by default but in the upcoming Nokia N9 running Meego with an AMOLED screen they have opted for a very black theme. See here: http://www.engadget.com/2011/06/21/nokia-n9-first-hands-on/

Anyway only time will tell but for my $0.02 I'd say that in future of UI design black is the new black.