Bad Lockup? Or Good Energy Saver?

I have noticed lately that one of the good but misunderstood features in the Treo 680 is the energy saving features. With the new features the Treo has a great knack of turning the screen off when it's doing something that you can't affect. An Example is when the system restarts and the phone is turning on and searching for signal. The system would normally be unresponsive at this time, but the screen would be on. Now at times like these the screen goes black!

The problem with the nice feature is that it took me 3 months to realize this was happening. Instead every time this happened and the system seemed unresponsive I would get impatient and do a reset. DOH!

Now that I am aware of how the system is trying to save energy I am more patient and have noticed many areas where it is doing so. It does this now when I am updating Quick News in the morning or when I am doing a long backup. The old 650 would stop syncing quick news when I turned off (or it automatically) the screen.

So needless to say this is a very nice little power saving feature that a newbie to a 680 may not recognize as such right off the bat.