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E-Ink, Largely Limited to E-Readers, Appears in a Chinese Smartphone

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Re: E-Ink, Largely Limited to E-Readers, Appears in a Chinese Smartphone

#21

Post by xtimesninety »

mistercheese wrote: post #4

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 us…

I'd love an e-ink android tablet too. Reading on an LCD tablet is painful especially if you are already staring at a computer all day. I almost decided to buy the Nook Glow because I've seen it installed with android 2.1 but it seems most apps are incompatible, so I went with Kindle Paperwhite which does web articles pretty fine with it's Send to Kindle feature.

Btw there's a chrome extension of Send to Kindle so you don't have to email articles. Also if you like reading Hacker News on the kindle browser check out http://bit.ly/hnkindle :)

Re: E-Ink, Largely Limited to E-Readers, Appears in a Chinese Smartphone

#22

Post by xtimesninety »

netcan wrote: post #17

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.

A dual mode display would be nice too. Something that could switch to e-ink mode when reading articles or when it is on standby. That way we don't have to wait for e-ink displays to have fast enough refresh rates.

Re: E-Ink, Largely Limited to E-Readers, Appears in a Chinese Smartphone

#24

Post by bryanlarsen »

pseingatl wrote: post #15
Wingman4l7 wrote: post #2

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 Motoro…

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 offe…

There was an F3 produced for the Mexican market, which you could find on Ebay back in the day. I purchased one and used it on the Rogers network in Canada for years. I loved it and its two week battery life.

Re: E-Ink, Largely Limited to E-Readers, Appears in a Chinese Smartphone

#25

Post by keenerd »

shelf wrote: post #10

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…

> 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...

Hopefully the new products will cost less than a grand.

Re: E-Ink, Largely Limited to E-Readers, Appears in a Chinese Smartphone

#26

Post by antidoh »

nfg wrote: post #18
pja wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Vim running on an e-ink display: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdmX52SCpG0

Reasonable.

BTW, don't use "test" as the name for your throwaways. test(1) is a thing.

  $man -k test
  ...
  test (1)             - check file types and compare values

Re: E-Ink, Largely Limited to E-Readers, Appears in a Chinese Smartphone

#27

Post by mtgx »

r00fus wrote: post #3

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 rece…

No, that was a big confusion about it. It's actually transflective LCD. Nothing to do with e-ink.

Re: E-Ink, Largely Limited to E-Readers, Appears in a Chinese Smartphone

#28

Post by hollerith »

netcan wrote: post #17

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.

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.

Re: E-Ink, Largely Limited to E-Readers, Appears in a Chinese Smartphone

#29

Post by netcan »

hollerith wrote: post #28
netcan wrote: post #17

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.

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.)…

300% 1st Deposit Bonus 25 Free Spins

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?

Re: E-Ink, Largely Limited to E-Readers, Appears in a Chinese Smartphone

#30

Post by mistercheese »

netcan wrote: post #20
mistercheese wrote: post #4

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 us…

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.

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.
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