To what lengths would you go to extend the battery life of your Android phone? Would you switch your display to night-vision mode if it could reduce the power consumption in half?

Android engineer Jeff Sharkey has discovered a fun hack that a allows you to power each specific color channel (red, green, and blue) found in an AMOLED display. Organic LED displays have separate pixel elements for each color channel so powering only one color can save quite a bit of power.

Which colors use the least amount of power? Jeff hooked up an industrial power meter and found that powering only the red pixels could nearly double the battery life.

“Filtering to show only red pixels only requires 35% of the original baseline OLED panel current, on average. Adding back the baseline current, the best case overall is about 42% of the original system current, effectively doubling the battery life. Also, showing only red pixels doubles as an awesome night vision mode, perfect for astronomy.”Jeff SharkeyAndroid Software Engineer

For the full details on how to apply the hack, be sure to visit Jeff’s blog. This looks like an interesting tool to conserve some power at night, so I expect we will see this feature built into some of the custom ROMs like CyanogenMod.