Always on Display (AOD) and Dual clock will soon be available on all Xiaomi smartphones with OLED screen

Xiaomi has just announced in a recent post on it's official Weibo account that the Always on Display (AOD) function which was recently introduced on the Xiaomi Mi 9 will soon be rolled out to other Xiaomi smartphones with OLED display panels.

In the Weibo post, the Chinese brand confirmed that Xiaomi phones equipped with OLED display panels, ranging from Xiaomi Mi 8, Xiaomi Mi MIX 3 and even the old flagship Xiaomi Mi Note 2 which was launched in 2016 will all receive the AOD feature in the coming weeks. However, there is no ETA on when to expect the update on the eligible devices.

Xioami's CEO and co-founder Lei Jun, also confirmed that the dual-clock mode will expand to all OLED-screen smartphones after beta testing with the Mi 9 is completed. With this new function, users will be able to view two different time zones on the Xiaomi Mi 9. This will really come in handy for users who frequently travels to places with different time zones. The feature is currently only available in the developer version of MIUI 10 but its expected to roll out to the stable version very soon.

The current stable MIUI version being pushed out to the Mi 9 is the MIUI V10.2.27.0.PFACNXM. It comes with the new global DC dimming feature. Xiaomi’s new DC dimming solution uses a fixed brightness mode switching node which integrates Xiaomi’s self-developing algorithm to add a “true hardware” DC dimming solution in the driver IC of the OLED screen. The update also brings anti-flicker mode and and it's just 260MB in size.

According to Xiaomi product director, Wang Teng, there are currently three DC dimming hardware solutions:

1. Fix the screen dimming level to the brightness mode switching node to ensure that the screen PWM dimming mechanism is not triggered. Then use the Qualcomm platform’s pcc+dither scheme to compress the color data output to the screen while ensuring the screen display effect remains stable. The gray scale value achieves the effect of reducing the brightness.

2. Fix the screen dimming level to the brightness mode switching node to ensure that the screen PWM dimming mechanism is not triggered. Then modify the alpha channel in the HWC hardware module, by adding a mask +dither solution with adjustable transparency, compressing the color grayscale value output to the screen to reduce the brightness of the screen.

3. Fix the screen dimming level to the brightness mode switching node to ensure that the screen PWM dimming mechanism is not triggered. A third-party display chip is used while ensuring that the display effect is stable.