In case anyone's interested, there actually is a way to determine the amount of Lux that the solar panels are registering at any given moment. You have to enter the Test mode to do it, so it's not something you can do 'on the fly', but certainly easy to do if you're sitting on a park bench, or at the beach.
The image below was during a random walk in the late morning, with clear sky. It's encouraging to see that the benchmark value of '50000 Lux' that Garmin uses isn't hard to exceed (ie. it's a realistic value). The test screen is a real-time display, so if you go into the shade, or cover your screen, the Lux will drop.
On a separate note, it also looks like the solar panels are indeed sensitive enough to detect very low levels of light. Was playing around yesterday, and it detects as low as 17 Lux from a dim light bulb. It's a promising indicator that it would be possible to execute a feature where the backlight activates in low-light settings, rather than just time-based for sunset.
Garmin_ODQA Garmin - Chris, what do you think? Pretty pleeeease?
