Apple re-invents the 90s

There’s one thing I miss from my 1998 Nokia 6110, and it’s not the metallic purple/green paint: you could just look at the screen whenever you wanted and know what time it was and whether you had new messages. It’s been bugging me for years that those fancy modern phones with pretty, shiny color screens had taken such a dramatic step back in usability, and most people didn’t seem to care one bit (with only a few clamshell designs adding a tiny external screen to that purpose).

Well, it must be bugging some Apple engineers, too; they have patented the idea of cutting icon-shaped holes in the screen’s primary backlight, and putting LEDs behind them that will turn on, and possibly blink, when the backlight is off and you have new incoming notifications.

I was initially going to write that this was one of the new functionality that would make you want to buy the 2009 iPhone, but come to think of it I’m not so sure it’s not just a case of patent trolling: it seems to me that cutting holes in the screen’s backlighting will require a lot of engineering to retain homogenous lighting over the whole screen (looking at my iPhone last night in the dark, I realized what a feat it must already be to achieve such perfect lighting on such a big screen and such a thin device), whereas it would be so much simpler to just put a couple blinking lights above or below the screen, near the speaker or Home button — at least as long as the iPhone is bigger than the screen itself.

Which reminds me: why the fuck aren’t there blinking lights to notify of new messages already? (Answer: because some Apple engineers care, but Steve doesn’t.)