Take your mobile phone out of your pocket and put it on the desk you’re sitting at right now. Kind of useless, isn’t it? It’s an all black screen with no useful information such as time, date, message notifications, you get the idea. Nokia is looking to change that with what they’re dubbing “Nokia Sleeping Screen“. Users of the Nokia N8, and we’re pretty sure every other Symbian^3 device out there, are familiar with the handy dandy clock screensaver that shows the time in a huge crisp clear font when your device isn’t in use. Thanks to the OLED screen only the pixels that need to show the time are used, so your battery isn’t depleted. Nokia Sleeping Screen takes things a bit further and lets you pick from a wide set of themes, it has message notifications, animations, and it’ll even display your battery chagrinning status. Check out the video below to get a better idea of what we’ve talking about.
Small stuff like this makes us happy. This project was probably done by an engineer or two in their spare time and instead of living as an installation file buried in the vast Nokia intranet, the Finnish firm has made it available to anyone with a Symbian^3 device. We’d like to see something similar come out for Android and iOS, but we’re worried that such applications would never be approved since they radically alter the way you interact with you device. Sure, there are plenty of ways to make your lock screen more useful so that when you push the power button you can see various bits of information at a glance, but it still requires a button press.
Anyway, if you’re got a device that supports Sleep Screen, give it a shot. If you don’t … show your friends and family some respect when hanging out with them by keeping your device in your trousers.