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

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.

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.

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

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

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.