Android app review: Screebl

Filed under Android

So this is a very quick review about a little util called ‘Screebl’ that fixes my pet peeve with Android… screen timeout: You need to set it to a low value because the screen takes up soo much of the battery power, but then the phone keeps locking when you are reading emails, browsing the web or otherwise using the phone!

Screebl fixes this in a rather obvious way – that is only obvious now that they tell you ;-)

Basically it detects when the phone is in an orientation that is unlikely to be a useable viewing angle (laying flat on tablet etc) and only lets the screen timeout when its in these unuseable states.

Combine this with monitoring of complete stillness detection and the lowest timeout system setting of 30seconds and it seems to work well.

The app itself is rather simple UI wise, theres only really:

a skeleton app to set preference on how sensitive its monitoring is.
a notification bar icon which turns green when screebl thinks you are using the phone and black when you are not.

The authors site states that it can save battery power because it can reduce screen power by turning off the screen more often, but I am yet to see if this really works out. As with all these monitoring apps, it is difficult to know if the monitoring is actually using up more power via cpu cycles than the display power it saves.

My recommendation

Download and try it, its free (there is a pro version that I suggest you get if you like the app – support that dev ;-)

TIP: I found that enabling the ‘stillness detection’ under prefs improved the detection. I think it basically assumes humans cant hold the phone completely still – time will tell how this settings works when mobile is in car holder (I guess the car vibrations will keep the screen on).

Heres the QR code to install it: