Tip: Don’t Forget About the Nexus 6P’s Notification Light

Did you know that the Nexus 6P has a notification light? It does. It’s not on by default, though, which is a shame, because it’s a nice addition to the phone’s Ambient Display. If you are the type who gets up from a desk repeatedly throughout a day or is without your phone for lengthy periods of time, this can come in handy, as it lets you know that you still have notifications, long after Ambient has gone away. 

If you weren’t aware of the phone’s notification light, you can find controls for it in Settings>Sound & notification. Once in that screen, there is an option to toggle it to “on” further down the page under a “Notification” heading. You should see it listed as “Pulse notification light.”

Toggle that on and as notifications arrive, you will get both the Ambient Display quick pop-up along with a pulsing notification LED just to the left of the phone’s front-facing camera. What makes this a great complimentary piece to Ambient Display, is because as Ambient Display goes dark in between your next notification, the LED light will continue to flash and let you know that there are pending notifications you need to check on.

It also appears to be a multi-color LED, so if you want to get real busy with it, you can install something like Light Flow and put in work.