MS should turn Glance into Active Display

[KhawarNadeem]

Nokia was the first OEM to make such widespread use of display memory to show notifications, in the form of Glance.

Since then, Android OEMs have jumped on the bandwagon. Galaxy S and Note phones now have "ambient display", Nexus 6 has it, Moto Xs have it. I believe even high-end LG phones have display memory.

And surprisingly enough they are using it far better! I was just looking at some videos and came across this:

I had known that the Moto X had this glance-like thing, but I never could have fathomed they would be using THIS WELL!

Are Android OEMs doing it better? I think they are, and in such a short time they have refined it to perfection!
Should Microsoft turn Glance into a more useful feature? They certainly can. I would love to see this on the upcoming Lumia devices.

 

[Harrie-S]

I agree that that glance can be improved and I hope Microsoft is doing it.
Furthermore I really hope Microsoft has patented this "glance idea" so that they can get money if others use it.
And use this money to improve the glance features in windows phones.

 

[KhawarNadeem]

I agree that that glance can be improved and I hope Microsoft is doing it.
Furthermore I really hope Microsoft has patented this "glance idea" so that they can get money if others use it.
And use this money to improve the glance features in windows phones.

Do we know anything about how Nokia patenting Glance? I've never heard of it, but it is something they should have done, and it might be too late to do now. It's surprising how many new ideas WP came out with that are now being copied (which is not something I'm against - after all, WP did copy things like notification centre and quick toggles, and that's not so bad), but WP goes underappreciated for all the novelty in design and features it introduced to the world, such as glance and optical image stabilization and flat UIs.

If Glance becomes more like Active Display it would make the notification system of WP a hundred times better. Right now some people see glance as redundant because the lockscreen shows the exact same information with a button press or a double tap. The novelty is lost on them.

 

[xandros9]

I dont think glance is really patentable considering its just a clock essentially.

I had Palm PDAs that displayed a clock for a short time if you hit the center button.
The Treo Pro had an always-on clock screensaver like Glance.

Nokia had it on Symbian gizmos...
Palm's webOS had something similar in Exhibition mode, etc.

 

[KhawarNadeem]

I dont think glance is really patentable considering its just a clock essentially.

I had Palm PDAs that displayed a clock for a short time if you hit the center button.
The Treo Pro had an always-on clock screensaver like Glance.

Nokia had it on Symbian gizmos...
Palm's webOS had something similar in Exhibition mode, etc.

xandros9, u so smart. :3

Well, yeah, patenting it doesn't seem possible, but improving it does. Think of all the potential if Microsoft makes better use of something that's already built into a lot of devices that they have, and will be in the future. Glance has become a natural part of WP. And the way Android OEMs are making use of this technology goes to show how much they're pushing the envelope and how much MS needs to step up their game.

Microsoft is heading in the right direction these days though. I hope the implement this going forward. I would love to see it.

 

[Harrie-S]

You are probably right that "glance" is not patentable as a total but maybe some driving "technology" which is used for low power consumption or whatever.

 

[xandros9]

xandros9, u so smart. :3

 

[Neyney10]

Wouldn't it consume a lot of battery life? I mean, there are already people not using glance cause of the battery consumption. Wouldn't it make the battery life worse?

 

[KhawarNadeem]

Wouldn't it consume a lot of battery life? I mean, there are already people not using glance cause of the battery consumption. Wouldn't it make the battery life worse?

On AMOLED, no. Yes it has battery cost, but Glance uses a lot less computational power than pressing the power button to bring up the lock screen with all it's colours the added computation of allowing us to drag down the notification panel, etc. All that is loaded up when you turn on the screen.

I believe new-gen processors have specific low-power modules that can allow for the implementation of notifications without waking up the CPU cores. This dedicated section of the chip is what allows phones to have things like Glance and notification LEDs. So from what I gather, it will use less power than turning the phone on to check the same. Besides, display memory really reduces the load on the GPU. It's like having a RAM in the display, so if you're keeping a static image on the screen, the GPU isn't constantly updating the frames, and so there's that reduction in power too.

Overall, Glance is efficient. I find double tap to wake consumes more power because the digitizer needs to be kept active to detect the taps.

 

[RumoredNow]

I can see Glance replacing the lock screen when biometric locks get put in. I have always been eager to just have Glance and bypass Lock. Too redundant. I don't sit and stare at the weather picture on my lock screen, I just blow on past. It's a waste really.

 

[walrusmonarch]

I love moto display on my Moto X 2014. I really miss it whenever I use the 635... I find myself waving my hand over the 635 and getting frustrated that it is not lighting up and showing me notifications and such