

E-Ink, Largely Limited to E-Readers, Appears in a Chinese Smartphone - ardahal
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/506636/e-ink-largely-limited-to-e-readers-appears-in-a-chinese-smartphone/

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Wingman4l7
The first cellphone with a primary e-ink display AFAIK was, as the article
mentions briefly, the Motorola F3:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Fone> Unfortunately, it was a segmented
display, which IMO limited its appeal & practicality. It was also 2006 e-ink
tech, which had poorer contrast, slower refresh rate, and lower grayscale
level counts than that of today. Additionally, it wasn't "available through
Motorola's normal retail channels" in the US.

Really curious to see if this prototype becomes available; I'd like to see it
have a chance to succeed. The better contrast levels and refresh rates have
made e-ink more viable as a phone display. Unfortunately, e-ink seems to be
more expensive than the color LCDs in cheap, low-end candybar cellphones, and
the refresh rate and lack of color is not widely appealing. If you're after
awesome battery life, it's probably easier to just get one of those and carry
a spare battery or buy some sort of battery-pack case.

~~~
pseingatl
I purchased the Motorola F3 and still have it. Battery life is terrific. If
you're used to smartphones it's a downer, but for a cheap functional mobile
it's great. It is hard to find replacement batteries though, and the phone
does not have US or Canadian network settings. For Europe and Asia it's great.
Is color that big a deal? I'd rather have an E-Ink smartphone with great
battery life than color. Or at least offer E-Ink on some models.

~~~
abengoam
I also have one (that I used in the US btw). The screen was great, easily
readable outdoors, the phone was great, super simple, super light. And the
battery great.

The dealbreaker was the sms UI: it was absolutely horrible because of the
super limited amount of characters on screen at a given time (from memory, it
was around 7 or so), it was impossible to text and receive texts in a coherent
way.

But for the rest, I loved it.

------
mistercheese
On a similar note, I've been waiting to see an Android tablet, without an
anemic cpu, use a high contrast, fast refresh e-ink screen. The Kindle is
great, but I find myself mostly emailing articles to it from services like
Instapaper/Readability/Pocket and RSS/Google Reader and Flipboard/Google
Currents. It would be great if there were a powerful enough e-ink tablet to
access dynamic web content directly.

I find I use my tablet and cellphone mostly for reading (articles, books,
texts, emails), and the e-ink screen is much more pleasurable for me. Also, I
love having a laptop, cell phone, and tablet, but I hate having to charge 3
devices at the end of every day.

~~~
netcan
I think the problem would be that e-ink would require special UIs that have no
moving part, don't rely on scrolling, don't rely on colour, etc.

I think "mobile web" has taught us that. Increasingly we are finding that our
toaster can run firefox and our heating system can run word but Firefox and
the websites it displays weren't meant to run on a toaster.

~~~
mistercheese
Yes, I agree. "e-ink" optimized apps would probably have to happen for this
device. (Pagination instead of scrolling, buttons instead of swiping...)
However, these days some displays are getting 30fps (I don't know about
latency), so at least animations might be possible. I don't know about the
hardware limitations, but it seems hard to imagine the responsiveness of e-ink
won't improve enough.

------
r00fus
Isn't e-ink one of the main reasons the Pebble [1] got $10M in funding?

There's a lot of conjecture in this article - it mentions it "may" be able to
make a shatterless e-ink device, or e-ink "could be" made more responsive. Not
promising.

In addition what does this gain? Apple pretty much set the standard with glass
multitouch displays years ago, and I have yet to see a popular plastic
touchscreen phone display recently (scratching and smears are two big
problems).

It will be interesting to see what the prototype can offer (as I await my
Pebble as well).

[1] [http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/597507018/pebble-e-
paper...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/597507018/pebble-e-paper-watch-
for-iphone-and-android)

~~~
InclinedPlane
Technically the Pebble doesn't use e-ink, which is why they call it "e-paper".
It's actually a type of passive LCD which uses 1-bit of memory located along-
side each and every pixel in order to keep track of state, which vastly
reduces the power requirements. Unlike e-ink memory lcds still require power
to maintain an image, but the amount is very small (similar to an ordinary lcd
watch, for example) so battery life is still quite excellent.

This is the display the Pebble uses: <http://www.sharpmemorylcd.com/1-26-inch-
memory-lcd.html>

~~~
drivebyacct2
Was this cheaper than real e-ink or what?

Do you know if this is what is done for the displays on jump drives as well or
are those true e-ink?

~~~
InclinedPlane
I don't know about cheaper, but certainly more available. You can just buy
these memory lcd displays commercially. I think it probably takes a lot more
work to procure actual e-ink displays. I believe the jump drives you're
talking about do use e-ink, since they are completely unpowered when
disconnected and don't contain batteries.

------
alexchamberlain
I would really like an e-ink monitor for reading articles and programming.

~~~
pja
The WIMP UI really doesn't mesh with an e-Ink display, which is why you'll
never see this on consumer desktops. Touch displays have changed everything
though & people are more willing to experiment these days, so perhaps
something could be done.

I'd love to try one out for programming. Text interfaces (emacs / vim) and a
large e-ink display could be a perfect match.

~~~
alexchamberlain
I still want an LCD monitor too, but I have a 17 inch monitor for general
stuff and a 22" (I think) widescreen monitor vertical for programming. It's
the vertical one I'd like to replace.

~~~
kunil
You won't be able to scroll properly in an e-ink display. Either you will code
page by page or it will refresh every time you try to scroll

------
shelf
I have been waiting for a good Pixel Qi device (in any form factor, really,
although a 13" ultrabook or 7" tablet or 4" phone is ideal) to emerge for
several years, as it seems a good compromise between utility and readability,
although E-Ink appears much better to my eye.

As we've seen with the GS3, though, what people really want are bright and
oversaturated displays for occasional media use, rather than the 99%-of-use
task of monochrome reading and browsing.

~~~
keenerd
> I have been waiting for a good Pixel Qi device to emerge for several years.

Same here. Though an eink display would be almost as nice and seems much
easier to get ahold of. But we might not have to wait much longer... Quoting
Mary Lou,

> We will be announcing at least a half-dozen new devices with our screens in
> them in the next sevreal (sic) weeks.

[http://pixelqi.com/blog1/2012/10/30/another-device-with-
pixe...](http://pixelqi.com/blog1/2012/10/30/another-device-with-pixel-qi-
screens-starts-to-ship/)

Hopefully the new products will cost less than a grand.

------
raphman
Earlier discussion on HN: <http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=4683083>

------
6ren
What is vim like on an e-ink display? Especially the "animation" of cursor
movement, text entry, text editing and scrolling

~~~
nfg
Vim on e-ink: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdmX52SCpG0>

------
netcan
I would love to see what apps would be produced if e-ink devices became an
important platform. I really think about 80% or the apps I use could be remade
for e-ink without losing much functionality.

Forced simplicity is always interesting. Kind of a "didn't have the time to
write a short letter" principle.

~~~
hollerith
Instead of competing head-on with Apple, Google and Microsoft in the "mobile
touch" market, a much smaller player late to the market, like Ubuntu or
Mozilla, should probably have tried to differentiate its OS in some strategic
and major way or just stayed out of the market. (Note that even if being open-
source were enough of a differentiator, which I doubt, one of the established
OSes is already mostly open-source.)

Working well with e-ink would have been a good point of differentiation in the
mobile market given e-ink's advantage in energy efficiency.

~~~
netcan
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I think there were 2 big "opportunities" to create OSs. IE times when the
hardware existed & the demand existed: netbooks & "mobile." The latter wasn't
really an opportunity because the company that built the hardware & generated
the demand also made the software. Still it was enough of a gap that android
snuck in.

Ubuntu & Mozilla had a wide open chance with Netbooks for a couple of years.
There was demand. Manufacturers were keen. Vista was bombing. Users would have
excepted an OS that didn't run everything as long as it had some lite browser,
lite office app, Skype, media player and a few other bits and pieces optimized
for the little display. You could have gotten away with not having MS office
or Apple itunes, especially on the first generation Eee.

Both of those opportunities existed because of the millions of apps also know
as websites that they could run before any developer even knew they existed. I
don't think there will ever be an "in" that big.

e-ink phones?.. Maybe. Battery life would definitely be a selling point. Some
people need phones that last longer. But it's predefined as a niche market. It
wouldn't be very good on the web (try using a browser on an e-ink to see what
I mean. It's cute, but that's it.) so it would need custom apps. Without apps
I would love to see music players and email clients for e-ink, it'd be super
futuristic. But, to get developers you need scale and excitement. Would a
niche player be able to get that?

------
anigbrowl
_However, the super-thin capacitive touch e-ink display makes it incredibly
light—apparently less than 100 grams_

That's a big win. If the cost is low enough I think this has a lot of
potential.

