Use keyboard light sensor to control screen brightness

[Guest Webreaper]

Now, this is almost certainly a flight of fancy... but we have a device with a light-sensor on the keyboard, and a screen with a backlight. Any chance the two could work together so that when the keyboard is open, the screen dims if the ambient light level is low enough to warrent enabling the keyboard lights?

Reason being is that I have the keyboard open while using tomtom, and it would be great if whilst driving the screen would auto-dim when it got dark.

Just a thought, but you never know, eh? ;)

[Guest Paul (MVP)]

I've often thought exactly this, it seems so obvious, I don't know why they haven't done it!

If I turn my device on at night, I want minimum backlight automagically!

P

[Guest doctormetal]

It would be nice to have this. My old ipaq has a light sensor which can control the backlight.

If I turn on my tytn in the dark I can use it as a flashlight.

This might be handy sometimes, but mostly not.

But it should be possible to use a software solution to control to backlight based on certain conditions and assumptions.

For example:

• If is late in the evening and your gps is enabled then turn the backlight low because you are porbalby driving
  
• If it is halfway through the morning then set the backlight to full.
  

[Guest lozzd]

I use the awesome PhoneWeaver, and this allows for time related profiles (I currently use it to turn off the email notification sound overnight) and it lets you control most aspects of the phone, e.g. the brightness of the screen ;)

[Guest Webreaper]

It would be nice to have this. My old ipaq has a light sensor which can control the backlight.

But it should be possible to use a software solution to control to backlight based on certain conditions and assumptions. For example:

• If is late in the evening and your gps is enabled then turn the backlight low because you are porbalby driving
  
• If it is halfway through the morning then set the backlight to full.
  

Having used TomTom for a couple of months now I don't know why they can't handle this automatically. My 8-year-old Garmin Streetpilot III calculated the time of Sunset/sunrise based on the unit's current location and then automatically switched to night colours at that time. Strikes me that TT6 (and any other nav software) could adjust the brightness and switch to night colours automatically too.

I use PhoneAlarm and Mortscript so that with a single hardware button-press my phone switches to a new profile (with specific brightness and sound settings) and then when I exit TT6 it reverts back to my normal profile. But that still doesn't cover auto-switching of backlight brightness and TT6 colours during an evening journey.

Wonder if TT7 will have this feature?

Edited November 9, 2007 by Webreaper

[Guest lozzd]

I've always wondered why TomTom didn't have that facility. Indeed the age old Garmin's did a beautiful little animation when changing to night mode to indicate the sun had officially "set".