E-Ink, Largely Limited to E-Readers, Appears in a Chinese Smartphone • Hacker News Board

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

#31

Post by mistercheese » Wed, Oct 31, 2012, 5:20 PM UTC

xtimesninety wrote: post #21

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…

Yes, I use that and also have Instapaper/Readability regularly mail me articles. It's helpful but these are still hacks. 1) It's horribly painful to organize the articles, especially when spanning multiple pages 2) I have to know about the article ahead of time to send to the kindle, rather than discover on the device itself 3) I can't "Mark as Read" on the device itself right after reading 4) For Instapaper/Readability, only the latest ~20 articles are shown. Also, the API Amazon provided used to frequently break.

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

#32

Post by InclinedPlane » Thu, Nov 01, 2012, 1:09 AM UTC

drivebyacct2 wrote: post #11

InclinedPlane wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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?

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.

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

#33

Post by xtimesninety » Thu, Nov 01, 2012, 7:31 AM UTC

mistercheese wrote: post #31

xtimesninety wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes, I use that and also have Instapaper/Readability regularly mail me articles. It's helpful but these are still hacks. 1) It's horribly painful to organize the articles, especially when spanning multiple pages 2) I have to know about the article ahead of time to send to the kindle, rather than discover on the device itself 3) I can't "Mark as Read" on the device itself right after reading 4) For Instapaper/Readabil…

I actually stopped using Pocket (phone/tablet) and just use Send to Kindle for everything. It doesn't bother me too much that I can't archive/mark as read articles, I just delete them from my kindle once I'm done. Also I just order the articles by most recent and just use search if I need to find a specific article. I wanted to avoid relying on hacks so I guess this setup will be stable for a while.

It's actually amusing that since back then I've used ipod touch, android phone, android tablet, and now the kindle, for specifically reading articles from the web.

When I was in college I was actually printing web articles in batch during weekends, I just paste the plain text to MS word arranged in 3 columns in uniform font so it looks like a newspaper. Those were fun times since everything was so new to me :) that's way before all the instapaper/pocket came out.

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

#34

Post by abengoam » Fri, Nov 02, 2012, 4:44 AM UTC

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…

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.