All Luxelion watch faces are designed with battery life as a top priority. We try to include as much functionality as we can while minimizing resource utilization.
Advanced use of Garmin “Buffered Bitmap”
Garmin recently introduced new functionality for developers to drastically improve performance & battery life. This technology, called Buffered Bitmaps, allows watch face developers to reuse certain calculations & drawing, which is the main source of computational battery drain of all watch faces.
For example, when your watch goes into high power mode, the watch face redraws the screen every second. But only the second indicator usually updates. Why go through all the trouble to draw the rest of the face over again?
To conserve battery life, all Luxelion watch faces perform their calculations for each minute once and then re-use this work when updating the face every second. The result is a dramatic 25x CPU time reduction when in high-power mode over devices that don’t use this technology.
We only build watch faces for AMOLED screens
An AMOLED screen is a type of display technology found in many modern devices, including smartphones and smartwatches. It stands for Active-Matrix Organic Light-Emitting Diode, and refers to the way the display works. AMOLED screens are made up of a layer of organic material that is placed between two electrodes, which in turn form the pixels of the display. When a current is passed through the electrodes, the organic material emits light. This makes AMOLED screens the most energy-efficient of the three major display technologies (AMOLED, LCD, and MIPS).
Compared to LCD and MIPS displays, AMOLED screens offer a brighter and more vibrant display. This is because each pixel can be individually lit, meaning that the display can show more vibrant colors and deeper blacks. AMOLED screens are also thinner and lighter than other display technologies, making them ideal for use in devices like smartwatches. Additionally, because each pixel is lit individually, the display can be used in devices that have curved or flexible displays.
By specializing in AMOLED displays, Luxelion is able to build watch faces uniquely designed to maximize the capabilities of this new technology while preserving battery life.
Diligent use of lit pixels
One way we preserve battery life is by diligently using only the “lit” pixels we need. Because AMOLED screens only use energy to display colors other than black, we carefully use non-black pixels where they’ll have the most impact.
Smart AMOLED low-power mode
If you enable Garmin’s “Always-On Display” mode, your Luxelion watch face will switch styles when in low-power mode. We’ve built these special low power modes to look beautiful without sacrificing battery life.
Settings to preserve battery power
Most Luxelion watch faces also provide settings to reduce the amount of drawing on-screen. By reducing the number of gauges displayed or switching from analog to digital mode, you can selectively customize how much you’re willing to trade battery life for information.
Transparency into CPU time
As a special Luxelion exclusive, all our watch faces include an option where you can track the performance of the watch face, printing to the screen the time each “paint” took (in milliseconds or 1/1,000ths of a second).