Frivolous Low-power Displays (FLDs)
There is something disproportionately appealing about a tiny display.
Not a phone screen. Not a tablet. Not even necessarily a particularly useful display.
We’re talking about the little grey rectangle that appears on a charger, keyboard, power bank, pen, calculator, or some other device where you weren’t quite expecting a screen at all.
It might show a number, a battery level, a charging status, a mode, or some other small piece of information. Perhaps it has a handful of segments. Perhaps it is a tiny dot-matrix display. Perhaps it is barely more sophisticated than the displays we remember from old calculators.
And we think they’re great.
Here at USBHubbub, we’ve given these displays a name: FLD — Frivolous Low-power Display.
What is an FLD?
An FLD is a low-power display whose presence is arguably unnecessary, but makes the device more interesting.
The “low-power” part is important. We’re not talking about ordinary screens that happen to be small. One of the charms of these displays is that they can provide information continuously, or be readily available when needed, without consuming anything like the power of a conventional illuminated screen.
The classic example is the humble monochrome LCD.
A reflective LCD doesn’t need to illuminate its pixels in the way an emissive display does. Instead, the liquid-crystal layer changes how light passes through the display. Polarising filters and electrodes turn those changes into visible dark and light areas, allowing the display to show numbers, symbols or images using ambient light.
That makes a big difference to power consumption. The display itself isn’t continuously generating the light that you see.
And that leads to something rather wonderful: information that can just sit there.
A power bank can tell you how much charge it has. A charger can tell you what it is currently doing. A keyboard can show its connection state or battery level. A pen can tell you which mode it is in.
None of these things necessarily need a display.
That’s precisely the point.
Frivolous doesn’t mean useless
The word frivolous is doing some work here.
We aren’t claiming that FLDs are useless. Quite the opposite: many of them provide genuinely useful information.
A battery percentage on a power bank is useful. Knowing that a charger is delivering power is useful. Seeing a selected mode on a device can be useful.
But the device could often function perfectly well without the display.
A row of LEDs might have been enough. A button could have done the job. You could simply have plugged the charger in and trusted that it was charging.
The display is an extra.
And sometimes that extra is what makes the device interesting.
The appeal of the little grey screen
There is also something distinctly satisfying about the visual language of these displays.
A small grey LCD can look almost comically serious about its job. It doesn’t try to be a miniature smartphone. There are no animations, app icons or elaborate graphics.
Just information.
A few digits. A symbol. A battery outline. Perhaps a tiny graph or some other collection of segments.
It feels like a technology from a different era that has somehow survived into modern electronics — except now it can be embedded into an impossibly small charger or power bank.
And because it consumes so little power, there’s something pleasing about the fact that it can simply be there.
Why low power matters
The low-power characteristic is more than a technical curiosity.
For a battery-powered device, an energy-hungry display would undermine much of the appeal. A bright, constantly running screen would require a battery and power-management system capable of supporting it.
A low-power display changes the equation.
LCDs, for example, can use ambient light rather than generating their own illumination. Other display technologies, such as e-paper and some memory-display technologies, can also retain information without continuously refreshing the entire image.
This is why a tiny display can sometimes remain available for months or even years without the display itself becoming a significant part of the device’s energy consumption. The actual lifetime depends on the battery, display electronics, refresh behaviour, backlighting and the rest of the device’s power budget, so FLD isn’t intended as a precise battery-life specification.
Instead, it identifies a particular kind of design choice.
What counts as an FLD?
This is intentionally a slightly subjective category.
We generally look for a display that is:
- Low power — this is essential.
- Small or secondary — it isn’t the main interface of the device.
- Informational — it tells you something about the device or its operation.
- Somewhat unnecessary — the device could reasonably exist without it.
- Interesting enough that we’re glad it exists anyway.
That last criterion is the difficult one.
There is no technical measurement for frivolity.
That’s why FLD is a USBHubbub-defined characteristic, rather than an industry standard. It is our way of identifying a small feature that we think deserves a little more attention than it normally gets.
The exact display technology isn’t the important part. An LCD is perhaps the quintessential example, but other genuinely low-power display technologies can qualify when they have the same character.
A tiny bit of unnecessary information
Perhaps that’s ultimately what we like about these displays.
Modern electronics are increasingly capable of hiding their workings from us. A device does something, and we interact with it through a polished interface designed to make the underlying machinery disappear.
An FLD does almost the opposite.
It gives the device a tiny window into itself.
You can see what it is doing.
Sometimes that is genuinely useful. Sometimes it is merely reassuring. And sometimes it is completely unnecessary.
But if a manufacturer has gone to the trouble of putting a tiny, low-power display on something that could have worked perfectly well without one, we’re probably going to be pleased that they did.
That’s an FLD.
FLD at a glance
FLD — Frivolous Low-power Display
A low-power display whose presence is arguably unnecessary, but adds information, character, or a little bit of delight to a device.
Low power: Essential
Usefulness: Optional
Frivolity: Encouraged
Coolness: Entirely subjective