Nine years ago I posted on AAS about research from Forum Nokia about the relative power draws of OLED displays versus TFT/LCD when showing white material compared to black. The savings there were dramatic and somewhat 'worst case', but I've been emphasising ever since that when using AMOLED screens it's highly desirable to have as many applications as possible using a 'dark' theme. Year after year I persisted with these assertions, despite the industry at large ignoring the issue. And then, in the last 12 months, 'dark' has become fashionable, for which many thanks to developers everywhere. And you'll be interested in the video below, where PhoneBuff demonstrates conclusively just how big the power savings are for a dark themed phone/apps compared to the previous fashionable 'white'...

It should be noted that Symbian phones back in the day all had dark themes/options, ahead of the rest of the market, which tended to follow Apple post-2007. Samsung and others have dallied with dark themes in the meantime, but I'd like to give credit to Microsoft and Windows Phone 8 (and W10M) for also being 'dark from the start'. On a Windows phone it's trivial to stay almost 100% in a 'dark' environment. Yes, even in email. (Web browsing remains the usual culprit here, but you can't blame anyone in particular, that's just how web pages are designed!)

Plus there's the whole 'not being blinded opening up your phone at night' thing. Anyway, we got there in the end, eh? Dark FTW!