The brightness limitation is almost always in the software in these devices.. it's the same with Palm PDAs and other PDAs. There's a whole aftermarket of 3party applications which will dim the screen for you. It's unreal that something so simple couldn't be implemented correctly from the start: Let the user be able to set the light all the way down to zero. But somehow this doesn't seem to occur to developers.. as a developer myself I'm baffled. This is indeed crazy!