It certainly seems like a holdover from the past, the notification LED . In other times, as many of you will remember, it was practically an essential element of our mobile phone. But this has practically disappeared from all the phones we normally find it on, and it is something that we want or does not have a simple explanation, which has to do especially with the screens.
The notification LED was never a feature that a phone boasted, because we assumed that it should carry it, being a component widely accepted by terminal manufacturers. Now we have just experienced the reverse process, that of its gradual disappearance.
Sometimes we miss it
The notification LED has been around on smartphones for many years now, and it has been an extremely popular item with users. And it is thanks to him that we could know what kind of notifications we had received, even with the phone at a certain distance and in total silence.
This LED changed its color based on the notifications received, and its operation could also be completely customized. In fact, in Android and the different layers of customization we found specific settings for this LED, in order to customize its use so that it was even more useful. But there is something that has surpassed this functionality, and that we have chosen en masse.
Borderless displays, the beginning of their end
It is curious, because as such there has not been a clear substitute or heir to this technology in mobile phones. Speaking of personal experience, my last mobile with notification LEDs was the Sony Xperia XZ Premium that I bought back in 2018. Even then it was a phone with a form factor quite out of date with respect to its competition. And there we can find the explanation of why they have disappeared from practically all phones. And that phone still had a traditional design, with large borders at the top and bottom of the screen.
Logically this gave a large space to the manufacturer to place a notification LED. But that no longer happens, the maxim of most manufacturers is to offer us a phone in which the front is almost all screen , occupying more than 90% of the front in many cases. Logically with this form factor it is practically impossible for the manufacturer to integrate a notification LED , although there are cases in which they have been introduced. Also, there have been other factors that have invited to get rid of this LED. Like the notches or camera holes, which have also served to notify us of new events when the phone is locked. Especially when it comes to OLED or AMOLED screens, which can display graphics with lower energy consumption.
The notification LED is missed, but not so much as to prefer to have a screen that occupies the entire front of the terminal and has practically no borders. That is what has buried the LED, the evolution of screens, which has prevailed over everything else. Something that we celebrate because it has brought us much better telephones at very affordable prices, despite this LED.