Didn't even realize the led was something that had been removed. Mine has it on the upper edge, which is fine, although I'd prefer it on the front face so it can be 'muted' by flipping the phone over
Wait, aren't most phones OLED? Wouldn't it be trivial to light up a few pixels in the corner of the screen when it's off? Do phones not do this (I'm still running my S7 into the ground so I have a dedicated LED)?
It's not trivial. An LED only needs power to light up, an OLED Pixel always needs the GPU to be powered on and it would be a significant power loss to implement a pixel sadly
The full Always On Display (which shows the clock + some notifications) uses less than 1% battery per hour on my ancient S7, are new phones not any better than that?
It doesn't if the screen is connected directly to the frame buffer which can refresh independently. Whether that's actually implemented this way in hardware, well who knows, but I suspect it is as that's useful to display any static image. Then just power up the display driver for a microsecond to refresh the image if needed.
None of this is true. It may happen in practice on some poorly-designed devices, but the “GPU” in the SoC can remain powered off, and the display controller remain in low-power mode.