Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

E-Ink Android phone promises a week long battery life

androidos.in

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 90 posts

Re: E-Ink Android phone promises a week long battery life

#51

Post by 4ad »

borplk wrote: post #22
Lexarius wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Color would be great, though I think monochrome syntax highlighting would be a fair compromise for a first generation device. Bold for keywords, italic for comments or maybe strings. Maybe a few extra monospace fonts if you need more than that. Where's the kickstarter for this I can throw money at?

Yeah that's a good idea. The main problem with e-ink is the response time. The current screens are not responsive enough for typing.

Yes they are:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPdXAyvWZdI

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxwceUvxlCo

The problem with existing e-readers is with the poor programming of the display controller, not with the display itself.

Re: E-Ink Android phone promises a week long battery life

#52

Post by bryanlarsen »

dfrey wrote: post #43

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.

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.

Re: E-Ink Android phone promises a week long battery life

#53

Post by 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.

Re: E-Ink Android phone promises a week long battery life

#54

Post by Zigurd »

Zigurd wrote: post #53

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 rewritte…

Wait, it gets worse: once you have basic updating working, you face having to modify a lot of UI widgets that, for example, use smooth-scrolling, which would muddy-up an e-ink display. You could start by nerfing a lot of animations in Android, but I'd bet you would still encounter implementations that are not as clean as to use up-to-date animation implementations.

You would have to size the job by looking at every standard widget's implementation and factoring out the parts of that implementation that are hostile toward e-ink.

After all the widgets are clean for e-ink, you then have to take a look at some user interactions: Dragging a "thumb" to scroll through a list might be quite tough to do well no matter how it is implemented.

Re: E-Ink Android phone promises a week long battery life

#55

Post by Groxx »

Zigurd wrote: post #53

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 rewritte…

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 :|

Re: E-Ink Android phone promises a week long battery life

#56

Post by 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.

Re: E-Ink Android phone promises a week long battery life

#57

Post by tadfisher »

lifeformed wrote: post #56

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…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Fone

EDIT: I see you beat me to the punch.

Re: E-Ink Android phone promises a week long battery life

#58

Post by phunge »

columbo wrote: post #14
borplk wrote: post #6

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.

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-...

IMHO the eInk people are missing out by not getting their displays in the hands of more hobbyists. There aren't any reasonably priced development kits anywhere, they're nearly as expensive as the end-user devices. A lot of the end-user devices aren't hackable or have other compromises. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Re: E-Ink Android phone promises a week long battery life

#59

Post by listic »

lifeformed wrote: post #56

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…

I would be happy even without the "cheap".

I would really love it though if they made an open (in the sense of iOS/Android at least) operating system for such phones (yes, monochrome and with CPUs in single digit MHz probably) It would allow for third-party applications (or, at a pinch, I could write one myself) that no phone or watch manufacturer ever makes right. Like UI customization for texts or alarm clock that makes sense for polyphasic sleep. But this, I'm afraid is a thing that will never be made: all innovation seems to be in the segment of touch-screen slate phones nowadays.

Re: E-Ink Android phone promises a week long battery life

#60

Post by listic »

tadfisher wrote: post #57
lifeformed wrote: post #56

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…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Fone EDIT: I see you beat me to the punch.

Hm. Motorola Fone was released in 2006. No successors since?
Post reply on HN