Apologies if this is stating the blindingly obvious, but the unit can display a clock at normal screen brightness if that's what you want ... but this isn't in the handbook. You have to first switch to the alternative skin, and that gives you a clock button on the Android home screen. There are settings to control the type (digital/analogue), size, and position of the clock, although I haven't tried those, the big analogue clock works fine for me. It's mildly annoying having to first cancel the start-up screen then select the clock every time, but it seems to be characteristic of this unit that it doesn't remember what it was showing when it was shut down.