It’s 8 AM, and you’ve just had your first cup of many cups of coffee for the day. You’re on the job, ready to work, and you check your phone for any missed notifications. None. Cool.
15 minutes later, and you swear you feel a familiar bzz bzz from your pocket. You bring out the phone, press the power button to wake it up. Nothing. Phantom vibrations. You set your phone down on the table at this point. It’s more convenient this way.
Throughout the rest of the day, you get up, walk away, come back, and consistently wake your phone up to check for notifications. Sometimes there are some, and sometimes there are none. It’s slightly annoying, but not a huge deal. Still, perhaps there was some way to make this life full of notifications a little bit easier, a little more convenient – perhaps with a small LED indicator of sorts?
If you’ve ever owned a flip phone, feature phone, a BlackBerry, and even select Android smartphones you’re probably familiar with a feature like this:
Just a simple outward indicator that you had something to check on your phone. A text message, a phone call, an e-mail, a voicemail – it could be a number of things. If the light doesn’t flash, you don’t need to check for notifications. It’s one of the most basic features for any phone to have, and yet for whatever reason many smartphones no longer employ this particular feature.
Some do, such as HTC, which always seems to have a notification LED behind the speaker grille on the front of their devices; it’s an odd place to put it for sure, but it’s subtle enough to notice and not terribly distracting. Samsung also employs the notification LED in their smartphones, including the Samsung Galaxy S6.
Certain smartphones have added an alternative, hands-free notification method of their own. Nokia Lumias feature Glance, Motorola’s Moto X featured Active Display, and Nexus 6's Ambient Display each give a detailed review of what you've missed while you were "away" from your phone. Even then, though, these new fangled methods of notifications aren't all that great. While I do like this type of notification system, there are often times where I just wish I had an old fashioned LED light to let me know what I’ve missed. It’s just a simple, non-invasive reminder that I need to check my phone. It doesn’t always have to be fancy.
What’s even more bothersome is that plenty of phones actually have the hardware for an LED notification, but without research, external apps, or sometimes even requiring root access, users don’t have a way to use the feature. Take the Nexus 6, for example. A lot of people didn’t realize it, but the device does have a notification LED that can only be activated (and minimally so) with root access.
Why not just include it again, even as an option?
It’s a small feature, but I think it’s a useful one that more manufacturers should include and make available to users. It just seems like a trivial thing to leave out (and yes, a trivial thing to complain about as well) but it wouldn’t take too much work to implement them in phones again. Yeah, there are more extensive “versions” of the notification LED now that provide more detailed information, but I do think a lot of people prefer that small indicator light of yesteryear. It's definitely something I would consider useful in a device like, say, the iPhone (which has nothing).
What about you, readers? Do you have a phone that’s missing the notification LED, and if so, do you wish that manufacturers would make this a standard feature again? Let us know in the comments below!
