The N810 has a ambient light meter on the front beside the camera (that I keep annoyingly covering up with my thumb). The brightness is automagically adjusted using this as an input to keep the same apparent brightness of the screen. It will turn the brightness down in a dark environment and turn it up in a bright one and the range offset is adjusted by the brightness slider, not the brightness directly. I haven't found a way to turn this off.

It is a neat feature but I have found that it is non-ideal in two ways:
1) I keep on falsely triggering it to think I am in a dark room when I am not by covering the sensor with my thumb.
2) The adjustment is quite step-wise and delayed.

If you could implement it with fixes to both smoothness of transition and latency without gobbling CPU time with frequent hardware polling, that would be superb. Otherwise, I think that I will install your applet now just because it disables the effect ... the fact that it is a cool applet-bar space saver is a bonus.

Not sure that you can do anything about my thumb :]