Taking out your phone to text or answer emails during a movie won't just earn you dirty looks by theater goers. Some vigilantes are starting to take matters into their own hands. We don't blame them.
Still, there are instances where a text or email legitimately calls for a prompt response. If those situations occur in a dark movie theater, conference room, or bedroom, help keep things civil by inverting the colors on your phone.
The quickest way to do this on the iPhone (in iOS 6) is to invert the colors on the screen with a home button triple click. Setting this up is easy: Go to Settings > General > Accessibility > Triple Click Home, and select "Invert Colors." Voila. Whenever you tap the home button three times in quick succession, your phone will automatically switch from its normal colors to the inverted ones.
Keep in mind that if your lockscreen or homescreen is already dark, inversion may not have the desired effect. However, if you're reading email, text messages, or an RSS feed on a light background -- which most of us do -- a quick color inversion will take care of that annoying bright-white glow. It'll even make reading in low light a bit easier on your eyes.
Of course, you can also just lower the brightness of your phone too. With iOS 7, due out next week, you'll get the option to easily adjust brightness by swiping upwards from the bottom of your display. But the benefit of using triple click to invert colors is that you can do it from your pocket before you've fully pulled out your phone.
On Android, you can accomplish the same thing by going into Settings > Accessibility and selecting "Inverted Rendering." Another bonus? Unlike on the iPhone and other LED screened devices, inverting colors on AMOLED Android devices will actually help save battery life.
