Android Flashlight Apps Compared

By Rob Jackson on October 28, 2008
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I checked out Android’s first two “flashlight” applications, ever prevalent on the iPhone as well, and gave them a test run. All the apps do as you probably could have predicted, is keep your backlight turned on. But in actuality the 2 apps I looked at - IO Flashlight and Flashlight - had 2 very distinguishing features that separated them.

The IO Flashlight allowed you to change the color of the screen but unfortunately, the application uses whatever brightness your current phone backlight is set to. In the video, mine is set to DIM and therefore the flashlight was quite DIM. If I wanted a BRIGHT flashlight I would have had to go into my phone settings and alter the brightness of my main screen. But then doesn’t that somewhat defeat the purpose of a simple flashlight?

The Flashlight application solved this problem by automatically setting your phone’s backlight to the brightest mode possible. But, it didn’t have that cool color spectrum for you to choose from.

Take your pick - they both have predictively simple features and serve their purpose. Neither will find a place on my home screen but I will probably stash it in a “Random Folder” for some bizarre time when I actually… need a flashlight… and don’t have one.

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4 Responses »

  1. Android-Freak.Org on October 28th, 2008 at 10:59 am:

    Why would anyone want to use colored light?
    That effectively lowers the available light since white is as bright a color there is.

  2. Matt on October 28th, 2008 at 1:54 pm:

    I have 2 comments:

    1) You would use colored light in order to minimize the affect on your night vision. Red affects your eyes the least in terms of adjusting to the dark.
    2) I find flashlight applications a bit overdone since if I need a flashlight (like when I come into a dark room and don’t want to turn on the light), I just turn on my phone backlight and I can see just fine.

    I suppose if you need a light for an extended period of time, you might find this useful but the amount of times when I might use this are slim-to-none.

  3. Adrian on October 29th, 2008 at 2:18 am:

    I am in the military and we have to use red light when we are in tactical or “blackout” operations. Like Matt says, it reduces the effects that white light has on your night vision. If white light is used and then turned off, your night vision takes significantly longer to return than if you were to use red light.

    This is a REALLY handy feature as map reading in blackout operations is tough with a red light as our military maps use red lines to denote certain features. The red lines become invisible with red light. A simple solution would be to change the tint of the light to blue or something else other than white.

  4. Peli on October 30th, 2008 at 4:53 pm:

    Hi,

    Thanks for your review! We have updated the OI Flashlight application in the Market! Please try it out again :-)

    If there are still issues, please let us know and we’ll try to improve that!

    Peli

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