For a long time, Android devices have offered various ways of visually seeing your notifications. From Ambient Display to LED notification lights, the Google Pixel offers two uncomplicated yet battery saving ways to get your attention. Out of the box, Ambient Display is turned on so there really isn’t anything you need to do here. However, located on the front of the phone and to the left of your speaker grill, but buried in your notification settings, there is an option to turn on the “Pulse notification light” and it’s not turned on by default. It’s hard to say why Google didn’t enable this particular setting out of the box, but is nice to know that it is there if you want to use it. This wasn’t a feature that was mentioned during Google’s Pixel announcement, but many users are likely glad they added it in to the phone.
Because you can customize how you see your notifications, you can set these visual cues together and have them both on, or you can separate them and choose one over the other. The good thing though is that enabling the notification LED only requires a few steps. You are going to go into “Settings”, and then look for “Notifications”(this should be in between “Display” and “Sound”). From there, you are going to tap the gear icon located at the top-right corner of your screen. Finally, you can enable and disable the “Pulse notification light” by tapping on the toggle button on the right. After this feature is enabled, you will be greeted with an almost multi-colored pulsating light that will appear every ten seconds after a notification is received.
So go ahead and try it out. Its nice to have some visual cues every once in a while that will remind you that a notification has come in. As of right now, the default notification light color is universal through out all notifications. However, their are plenty of third party applications via the Google Play Store that will allow you to alter the color for a particular notification type, and in most cases the color will be representative of the color scheme of the notification, like a darker blue for Facebook.
