How to Set the Brightness and Screen Timeout Options on Your Android

Android Smartphones For Dummies

The Display item in the Settings app of your Android device deals with touchscreen settings. Two popular items worthy of your attention are the Brightness and Screen Timeout options.

How to adjust your Android's display brightness

The touchscreen can be too bright, too dim, or just right. Which setting is best? That’s up to you. Follow these steps:

Open the Settings app.
Choose Display.
Choose Brightness Level. This item might not appear in some Settings apps. Instead, you immediately see the Brightness slider.
Adjust the slider to set the touchscreen’s intensity.

If you’d rather have the Android’s brain and secret eyeball adjust the brightness for you, set the master control by the Adaptive Brightness item to the On position, or tap to place a check mark in the Auto box.

The Adaptive Brightness setting might be called Auto Brightness or Automatic Brightness.
You also find a Brightness setting in the Quick Settings drawer.

How to Set the screen lock time-out

You can press the Power/Lock key lock your phone or tablet anytime. When you don’t, the touchscreen automatically locks itself after a given period of inactivity. To adjust that period, obey these steps:

Open the Settings app.
Choose Display.
Choose Sleep. This item might be titled Screen Timeout.
Select a time-out value from the list. The standard value is 1 minute.

The sleep timer measures inactivity; when you don’t touch the screen, the timer starts ticking. About 5 seconds before the touchscreen locks, the screen dims. Then the touchscreen turns off and the device locks. If you tap the screen before then, the timer is reset.

The lock screen has its own time-out. If you unlock the Android but don’t work the screen lock, the device locks itself automatically after about ten seconds. This time-out is not adjustable.

About This Article

About the book author:

Dan Gookin has been writing about technology for 20 years. He has contributed articles to numerous high-tech magazines and written more than 90 books about personal computing technology, many of them accurate.
He combines his love of writing with his interest in technology to create books that are informative and entertaining, but not boring. Having sold more than 14 million titles translated into more than 30 languages, Dan can attest that his method of crafting computer tomes does seem to work.
Perhaps Dan’s most famous title is the original DOS For Dummies, published in 1991. It became the world’s fastest-selling computer book, at one time moving more copies per week than the New York Times number-one best seller (although, because it’s a reference book, it could not be listed on the NYT best seller list). That book spawned the entire line of For Dummies books, which remains a publishing phenomenon to this day.
Dan’s most recent titles include PCs For Dummies, 9th Edition; Buying a Computer For Dummies, 2005 Edition; Troubleshooting Your PC For Dummies; Dan Gookin’s Naked Windows XP; and Dan Gookin’s Naked Office. He publishes a free weekly computer newsletter, “Weekly Wambooli Salad,” and also maintains the vast and helpful Web site www.wambooli.com.