

E-Ink Android phone promises a week long battery life - arpit
http://androidos.in/2012/10/e-ink-android-phone-promises-a-week-long-battery-life/

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lifeformed
I dream of one day when someone will make a minimalist phone that meets my
needs. The perfect phone for me would be this:

\- Can make and receive calls and texts.

\- Has a phone book (just a name/number key-value pair).

\- Has a clock and timer/alarm.

\- NO OTHER SOFTWARE FEATURES. Nothing extra other than calls, texts, phone
book, time.

\- Small e-ink display.

\- Simple T9 keypad.

\- Rugged construction, should be able to take a lot of abuse. Should not feel
cheap.

\- Small and thin.

\- Tons of battery life.

\- Beautiful, minimalist visual design.

\- Cheap enough that you can lose it without feeling bad.

That's all I want - something optimized for calls and texts, nothing more or
less. It would be a cheap phone to produce, I think. Would there be any market
for this?

EDIT: the Motofone looks like it's kind of like this
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Fone>), but it has a segmented display
(bad for texts), and it sounds like it feels a bit cheap. It could also be
prettier.

~~~
glomph
What is wrong with a classic nokia phone? The battery life is easily a week on
some of them and other than the e-ink they basically have all of these
features.

~~~
lifeformed
They're pretty nice, but I'd like something thinner and more stylish (not the
most critical attribute but it's a big plus).

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aidenn0
I have a crazy idea, how about a touch LCD phone that is:

1) actually small enough to fit in my pocket

2) Not PoS 3 years out-of-date hardware designed so that the phone company can
offer a "free" smartphone.

The smaller screen would probably greatly improve battery life.

~~~
batiudrami
Like, the iPhone? Or maybe a Lumia 800? They both fit comfortably in all mens'
pockets (and most women's, assuming they have pockets).

The problem is Android is such a power hungry OS that you need to be
constantly updating the specs as hardware and app demands grow higher, and
high-end specs require space to fit everything in (including ever-growing
battery demands), so small Android handsets have to make compromises on specs.
It feels sort of like PCs did 10 years ago - 3 years of use and your top-of-
the-line PC was near unusable. I find Windows Phone and iOS don't suffer from
this nearly as much.

~~~
ps258
It isn't android. It's the manufacturer skins. AOSP Jellybean runs really
smooth on my low end phone. (512 MB ram, 600 MHz processor) But HTC Sense 4
runs like crap.

~~~
batiudrami
It's a bit of both. The original Galaxy S (which was only a year and a half
old at the time, and was a top-of-the-line phone) struggled really hard with
stock android ICS for me.

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raphman
For what it's worth: Onyx, the manufacturer, only half-heartedly support their
current e-ink readers, leaving lots of annoying bugs unfixed. However, there
are very concrete rumors that Android is also being ported to the some Onyx
e-ink readers [1].

[1]
[http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showpost.php?p=2237483&...](http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showpost.php?p=2237483&postcount=23)

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rtcoms
I wish for a dual screen mobile (one side LCD and other side E-Ink)

~~~
goatforce5
Can one or the other be (more or less) completely transparent? Is it possible
to have one screen layered over the other such that the LCD only becomes
active when the user is directly interacting with the device?

(Off to the patent office I go!)

~~~
beagle3
Take an OLPC with you to help you with the filing. It had those in 2008 (or
even earlier). Google "Pixel Qi"

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dfxm12
Is "week long battery life" really a killer feature? As long as a phone has
enough battery to make it through the 16 hours per day most of us are awake,
anything more is just gold plating.

Just how big is the "week long battery life" niche?

~~~
stinos
for me this is a feature: not having to think about or doing the effort of
putting the phone in the charger every single day? I'll sign for that. (it's
also marginally cheaper since you don't waste elektricity if using the charger
only once a week vs every day. And it makes it useful in countries not having
power everywhere)

~~~
hollerith
>t's also marginally cheaper since you don't waste elektricity if using the
charger only once a week vs every day

I read recently that recharging an iPad every night costs less than 2 cents
per year.

~~~
micampe
I think you are referring to this study: [http://blog.opower.com/2012/09/how-
much-does-it-cost-to-char...](http://blog.opower.com/2012/09/how-much-does-it-
cost-to-charge-an-iphone-5-a-thought-provokingly-modest-0-41year/)

Which has the iPhone 5 at $0.41/y, the Samsung S III at $0.53/y and the iPad
(model unclear, but I guess the 3), at $1.36.

I agree with your point though: the electricity cost of these devices is
already negligible, an e-ink display wouldn’t make much of a difference.

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dagw
This could become an awesome secondary travel/camping phone. Sure when I'm
home I generally remember to charge my phone every or every other night, but
when out and about there are many times when charging is inconvenient of
impossible.

~~~
regomodo
For camping surely an old nokia will do? I keep one, which isn't much bigger
than a mars bar, for this purpose and the battery lasts for ages.

~~~
dagw
Sure, I do the same. But having smart phone features like e-mail and a web
browser would no doubt be handy at times. For example looking up bus/train
schedules for getting home in case you end up delayed or have to change your
route.

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pepijndevos
If it has USB OTG and allows installing custom Linux software, I'm sold.

Current status: [USB Host on the Kindle 4](<http://www.christian-
hoff.com/?p=139>)

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borplk
I have been thinking about a responsive e-ink for some time.

What I would love is a responsive e-ink screen to use for text editing,
Imagine a large responsive e-ink screen that you can use for coding, reading,
etc...

Although for coding it would also need some basic colours.

~~~
columbo
Here's an example of vim running on an eink device
(<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdmX52SCpG0>). A lightweight, long battery
life eink-coder would be a fantastic thing to have when travelling.

Grayscale vim would be good enough for me:
[http://sstallion.blogspot.com/2010/10/newsprintvim-
pleasant-...](http://sstallion.blogspot.com/2010/10/newsprintvim-pleasant-
monochromatic.html)

~~~
freehunter
I'm still waiting on my Raspberry Pi (if it ever gets here, I've been waiting
6 months) with the dreams of turning it into a small, Radio Shack-style Vim
machine. Building a case with a keyboard, a small display screen, a command
line, and a huge battery. When it's connected to the Internet, it would push
the changes up, but when it's not it would cache it locally.

Sometimes I like to go camping while I work, for the peace of mind of sitting
in nature away from everyone. Really lets me focus. My Thinkpad gets 10 hours
of battery life, but that's not always enough. Charging it in my car isn't
really congruent with getting away from it all.

~~~
fsiefken
I have similar dreams but then a battery powered emacs machine. As a homebrew
Raspberry Pi powered device will probably needs more power then a hacked phone
running linux I'll opt for the latter. If only such a phone had a vizplex
e-ink display! There is a PocketBook which supports a bluetooth keyboard, also
a nice option.

~~~
freehunter
A hacked phone might need less power, but it's also smaller, which means a
smaller battery. My phone gets 10 hours of battery life in constant use, and
my laptop gets 10 hours of battery life in constant use. Obviously the laptop
has a much, much larger battery, and sits in a much, much larger footprint.
Imagine phone-grade hardware with a laptop-sized battery.

I'm not criticizing your version of the dream. That's the beauty of open
technology, everyone can have their own dream and see that it becomes reality
with a little bit of work. What I was thinking of would be about netbook sized
with the majority of it being battery. Full sized keyboard mounted in,
console-sized display, leaving a huge empty space inside. Without having it in
my hands to actually judge battery use, all I can do is dream of a 30-hour
battery on a black-and-white, unbacklit display powered by a full sized
keyboard.

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mtgx
It could be useful in India or African countries with not much access to
energy. But I doubt people from developed nations would want this. It most
likely offers nowhere near the experience of an LCD device. Remember, besides
the lack of color issue, e-ink devices work best when the on-screen image is
static, and not changing often.

~~~
buro9
I go on cycle tours every now and then, camping some of the time. I'd love a
backup phone for use during tours that could hold a usable charge for 4 or 5
days.

My father does motorcycle touring and would love the same.

I have an old Sony Ericsson M600i symbian phone (
<http://www.gsmarena.com/sony_ericsson_m600-1425.php> ) I dig out for when I
go travelling. The battery is still good for 10 days stand-by. It's such a
pain to resync contacts, mail, etc... that all I really do is move the SIM
over and use a travel email account.

If I could have the battery life of the old phone with the functionality of a
new smart phone, then I'm very willing to sacrifice the screen quality to
achieve it.

~~~
Adirael
I have a 12V plug on my motorcycle (fused, regulated. I installed it for like
10 bucks). I also have a couple of solar chargers, they hold 2 AA batteries.
They take about 8 hours of sunlight to fully charge and can put an iPhone into
the 70% range.

~~~
stickfigure
When there's sunlight, you want to be out riding, not sitting around waiting
for your phone to charge! And plugging/unplugging the phone every time you get
on/off the bike is annoying.

First-world problems :-)

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Zigurd
The difficult part of making an e-ink Android, or applying an e-ink display to
a general-purpose platform is that the way screen-drawing is implemented has
not been designed with e-ink in mind.

The display might either seem "flashy" because the full screen is blanked and
drawn for every update, or the screen gets "muddy" because the graphics stack
isn't keeping track of how many times a screen areas has been rewritten
without being reset.

Page-at-a-time updates, like those between pages of a book, are the most
compatible with how e-ink works.

~~~
Groxx
I've got a rooted Nook ("simple touch"), it handles the redrawing remarkably
well. I wouldn't call it production-ready, but the shadowing is small and it's
more than usable. Available RAM is abysmal, but that's a separate problem.

The weirder part is how e.g. dragging an icon makes a greyscale-rainbow trail
behind it as it redraws pixels. Panning through the app screens is also pretty
crappy, and all the little animations are so over the top with a slow screen
rate that the results are basically laughable. I wish there were a "never
animate anything, ever, for any reason" switch I could flip :|

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goombastic
Would be useful to have as a second screen. Dual touch maybe? eink for phone
functions (60% of the time in my case) and lcd for when you need the fullcolor
display (GPS mode, movie mode, web browsing)?

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dutchbrit
I wouldn't buy it, due to not really being able to see photos on an e-ink
display. I've just become so use to color. Great idea though, especially for
people that travel a lot, go camping etc...

It doesn't seem that snappy right now speed wise. Not sure if thats the phone
or Android though (I'm not a big Android user), but nonetheless, cool stuff.

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JVIDEL
Not bad at all, but then again a IMOD display would be better: its in color
and it has much faster refresh rates so it can play video and use touch UIs
just like in any LCD.

It has some downsides compared to regular screens but it looks even better
than eInk and has similar advantages like low energy use.

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Grunnt
My 30 euro simple Nokia phone has a week long battery life, and I'm pretty
sure the user experience it offers will be a lot better than an e-ink Android
phone.

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hayksaakian
I'd take a black and white screen with the promise of better battery life if
the display was at least as functional in all other aspects

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dfrey
e-ink isn't suitable for anything that moves, so it's only going to be good
for a really basic phone + contacts + text messaging device. Android seems
like massive overkill and a waste of battery for those relatively simple
tasks. I think there is still demand for a high quality phone that is light on
features and inexpensive.

~~~
bryanlarsen
Overkill, yes. However, it's probably also cheaper than going with anything
else. It might have cost them $1 more in hardware to go with 512MB of RAM
rather than 256MB but they probably saved $10 in licensing fees.

Yes, 99% of Android apps will be useless, but 1% of a very large number is
still a large number.

As for battery, virtually all of it goes into the display and the radio. The
CPU is sleeping most of the time, so the OS chosen would have very little
impact on that.

"I think there is still demand for a high quality phone that is light on
features and inexpensive."

Sorry, not going to happen. In a modern phone, features are a lot cheaper to
add than quality.

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jasongullickson
I'd replace my Droid RAZR with one of these in a heartbeat...

