Screen backlight extremely annoying!!! RIM fix this!!!
OK, I hands down love carrying the PB everywhere - but today I got ****** annoyed by the software/screen light automation.
I was sitting in a restaurant in a shadow, but surrounded by sunlight. The screen was at full brightness - I could not change that (we had a lot of threads about this already and know that it's the software holding you off while in extreme sun-exposure). The problem is, my battery dropped 25% (!!) in 1 hour (!!!) because of the full brightness setting.
I then held my finger on the "red light" (which is the light-sensor actually) next to the camera and after about 5 seconds the backlight dropped to the level I wanted it to be and how I set it in the settings for screen backlight on battery. (I turned off automatic dimming to see the exact backlight manually set) - it was still perfectly fine to be read and not even half the brightness to full. That would have saved me a lot of battery I'm sure and I really want RIM to include an option to "ignore sunlight" - because it's not accurately measured in shadows surrounded by sunlight.
Just my two cents, needed to share it... got me crazy.
Update
Based on the answers I got here, there seems to be a missunderstanding. Therefore, more explicitly, this is my problem:
The Playbook thought I was sitting in bright sunlight and put the brightness all the way up, wasting my battery and I could not do anything about it!
The dim function is just there to *dim* the screen in case the surrounding environment is *dark* so the screen doesn't need to be very bright and battery can be saved.
There is no such setting to prevent the PB to *not* turn up the brightness.
And this is exactly my problem!
Thanks guys! Hope you don't feel like I'm making something up - this is indeed a battery drainer and useless if not possibly to be turned off.