hybrid e ink lcd display in stock

Got a netbook? Specifically, got a Samsung N130 or a Lenovo S10-2? Even more specifically, do you use it in and outdoors, but find it hard to read in the sun? We have good news! The Maker Shed will sell you one of Pixel Qi"s dual-mode displays as a straight swap-in for your existing LCD-panel.

The 10.1-inch screen runs in one of two modes. When indoors, or watching video, you use the regular LCD display, which will look pretty much the same as the one you already have. When you"re in to mood for some reading, or you are outside in bright sunlight, or you"re just running low on battery power, you can switch to the e-ink mode.

This disables the backlight and shows you hi-res, grayscale pixels, much like you"d see on the screen of the Amazon Kindle. Because it only uses power when updating the screen, it sips power.

There is also a hybrid mode, which lets the sun reflect off the back of the display assembly and back out through the color LCD. This both saves battery power and lets you view a normal color display outdoors.

The panel will cost you $275, which puts it out of the "merely curious" bracket but is still cheap enough for people who do a lot of outdoor computing. The Maker Shed store page also says that the panel will likely work in any netbook: the Lenovo and the Samsung are just the only ones so far tested and guaranteed.

And according to the Pixel Qi blog, which first described the plan to sell these panels separately from the company"s own notebooks, the swap-operation (swaperation?) is easy:It’s only slightly more difficult than changing a lightbulb: it’s basically 6 screws, pulling off a bezel, unconnecting [sic] the old screen and plugging this one in. That’s it. It’s a 5 minute operation.

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A recently published patent application suggests Apple is exploring ways to incorporate e-ink display technology into its iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. And unlike other e-ink devices, Apple"s hybrid system would be able to display sharp text in a range of lighting situations without sacrificing the ability to display full color, video, and graphics.

The application, Systems and Methods for Switching Between an Electronic Paper Display and a Video Display, was originally filed in October 2009. It describes a hybrid system that employs a combination of "electronic paper" with a more traditional color LCD or OLED display to gain the advantages of both display types. Such a display would be formed by sandwiching a transparent e-ink screen between a backlit color LCD or OLED panel on the bottom and a touch-sensitive glass panel on the top. The color display could display full color graphics and video, while the e-ink layer could display sharp text.

While that description sounds somewhat similar to Pixel Qi"s hybrid e-ink displays which can switch between e-ink and color LCD modes, Apple"s patent takes things a couple steps further. Control circuitry would analyze the video input and could switch modes depending on the type of content. Furthermore, the control circuitry could independently switch different areas of the screen to either mode as needed. For instance, a webpage may have a range of text with an inline video. The system could display razor-sharp text using e-ink, while the video is displayed using the underlying color display. Advertisement

One particular feature of the system, according to the application, is that the control circuitry in particular analyzes the video input to determine how fast different elements are changing. If the rate of change exceeds the refresh rate of the e-ink display, the color display would take over. Imagine the webpage in the preceding example: if you scroll the page quickly, the color display would be used to smoothly animate the scrolling. Once the scrolling stopped, however, the e-ink display would take over for the text once again.

Apple files numerous patents every year, so the mere fact that Apple filed a patent for a hybrid e-ink display is no guarantee that it will incorporate the technology into a future product. However, the technology could particularly enhance the iPad for e-book reading purposes. The iPad"s current display is great for reading books heavy on color images or that contain motion graphics or video, but the relatively low pixel density and backlit screen still makes reading long passages of text tiresome for many users. Many readers tend to prefer e-ink based devices like Amazon"s Kindle for this reason.

The Apple iPad 3 may have a hybrid LCD E Ink display, if a patent filed in October 2009 and revealed publicly today, goes into production. The system will automatically recognise what it’s displaying and change the screen display to suit. So when reading a book the E Ink display will be activated, with a backlight if needed.

It doesn’t stop there – the device will even be able to layer LCD and E Ink at the same time using multiple composite display regions. The translucent E Ink display will sit atop the LCD and below the touchscreen. This is just the kind of groundbreaking development Apple needs to get people queuing for its next release, tipped to ring in significant changes for Apple’s tablet. Even if it doesn’t need that to stir up a queue.

According to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, Apple is exploring the use of color paper displays by E Ink for its future products. Kuo says that this manufacturer’s technology is particularly well suited to enabling a low-power second screen experience for a foldable form factor device.

Of course, Apple does not currently make a foldable although there have been ongoing rumors that the company is considering designs for a foldable iPad.

Back in February, both display analyst Ross Young and Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman referenced a 20-inch folding MacBook/iPad design apparently in development.

What Kuo seems to be suggesting is that the e-paper panel would serve as the outward-facing display, providing a low-power accessory screen experience for users, who want to get some utility out of their foldable without having to unfold it.

For instance, the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold features a 6.2-inch AMOLED cover display, which makes the device look almost like a standard phone in closed operation. The user can unfold the device to reveal the flexible 7.6-inch main screen inside. An e-ink display would not be appropriate for this design.

However, the Galaxy Z Flip features a very small 1.9-inch OLED cover screen, which acts as a simple readout for the time and notifications display. This could easily be imagined as a color e-ink surface though, extending battery life significantly as e-ink do not consume power for static content. The significantly lower refresh rate of e-ink panels, compared to OLED or LCD, does not matter too much in this context either.

This use case is closer to what Kuo describes; e-ink / e-paper could become the mainstream choice for these outer accessory displays. Of course, Apple’s plans could change it any time and it tests many different technologies continuously. At this point, anything beyond the idea that they are exploring the potential for the the technology would be mere speculation.

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This is one of those things I’m going to have to actually see to grasp exactly how this can be done.  Comparing a Kindlee-ink display and an iPhone’s LCD display is like comparing apples to oranges.  They are so different.  They each have different functions and the Kindle is designed just for reading.  Sometimes it is good to escape internet and games, and just read.

From what I understand, the user will be able to switch between the iPhone 4 display and an e-ink display depending on their needs.  So, in theory, you could use the Kindle Application on your iPhone, and it would be more Kindle like than than the current version that is on the iPhone.  If you can use that application, it would still allow you to download and purchase books from the Kindle Store.

So, could this development kill the Kindle if it went into production?  Probably not.  Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) could either make a rival Kindle device, or they can focus on the Kindle software platform and e-book sales.  E-book sales are getting better and better all the time.  Especially with authors writing books exclusively for the e-book platform. Another key factor is cost.  Many people can’t afford an iPad yet.  Even an iPhone costs more than the Kindle does.

At CES 2023, TCL dropped a whole bag of gadgets — including new phones, a Windows convertible, and a new tablet with its own take on the color e-ink tech. Say hello to the TCL Nxtpaper 12 Pro tablet, which aims to beat the likes of Apple and Samsung with a palatable price, a screen that feels like paper, and a large canvas, too.

Unlike regular LCD panels that alter the screen temperature and give it a yellowish tint, TCL’s Nxtpaper tech relies on a built-in multi-layer filter system. This not only cuts down on the blue light exposure but also keeps the color profile as close to natural as possible and reduces the glare effect.

TCL ships a dedicated reading mode with its Nxtpaper line of tablets that turns the screen output into a grayscale mode for an e-ink experience. As for the paper part in the marketing material, TCL claims “a tactile feeling just like touching real paper,” adding that the actual display surface has a paper-like finish to the touch.

On the software side, you get a dedicated PC mode for effortless file management, plus a floating window mode to handle multiple app windows with ease. Take that, iPadOS 16. Disappointingly, the TCL Nxtpaper 12 Pro still runs Android 12 out of the box.

In 2023, TCL claims to have upgraded the Nxtpaper display tech, doubling the brightness output for a more comfortable outdoor viewing experience. However, the company assures that despite the bump in brightness figures, the screen is still capable of reducing the blue light output by up to 61 percent.

Delving into the technical side of things, the Nxtpaper 12 Pro tablet offers a fairly sharp 12.2-inch 2K (2160 x 1440 pixels) display with 370 nits of peak brightness and a 3:2 aspect ratio, somewhat like the iPad Pro. The stylus-ready screen, however, still doesn’t offer any high-refresh-rate magic.

The tablet draws power from the MediaTek MT8771 chipset, the same as the TCL 10S 5G tablet. It will be available in a single configuration packing 8GB of RAM and 256GB of onboard storage. Thankfully, you can pop in an SDHC or SDXC card to boost the memory.

The 8,000mAh battery is claimed to last up to 13 hours, beating the figures Apple touts for the iPad Pro. The TCL Nxtpaper 12 Pro supports 18W fast charging, and thankfully, the power brick comes bundled in the retail package. Notably, TCL bundles the standard e-pen stylus that can recognize over 8,192 pressure levels in the retail package, just like Samsung.

TCL also sells a detachable keyboard and a stand case, but you’ll need to fork over extra cash for that. There are a couple of 8-megapixel cameras on the front and a 13-megapixel camera at the back. The tablet is already up for grabs, priced at $499. There’s a 5G-ready version that will hit the shelves “later this year,” carrying a price tag of $549.

At its current asking price, the TCL Nxtpaper 12 Pro definitely offers a superior screen experience compared to the 10th Gen iPad and undercuts the Samsung Galaxy Tab S8. However, it does so at the cost of a significantly weaker processor. Plus, TCL’s software update record isn’t as good as Samsung’s or Apple’s.

At CES 2023, we interviewed the Assistant Vice President of E Ink, Tim O’Malley. The company is well-known in the tech world and produces e-ink displays that are used in e-readers, laptops, wearables, phones, and many other products.

Mr. O’Malley revealed a lot during the interview, including details about E Ink’s cooperation with BMW, its plans for expanding to other industries, and much more. You can read a brief overview of the interview below or check out the whole thing in the video above.

Q: Can you tell us a little more about your collaboration with BMW? Also, what challenges did you have to overcome to make it possible for BMW to put your color-changing material on their car?

A: A big announcement happened at the keynote, with BMW introducing its concept electric car. The car has a color-changing surface all over it, and we at E Ink are thrilled that we were able to work with BMW and supply them with the material they needed.

They really care about the lines and curves of the car at BMW in order to get the design they want. Some of these lines and curves are not the friendliest to work with, so we had to bend the material and build in ways to relieve the stress on it. There’s a big team at BMW we worked with to figure all this out.

A: The concept car uses 32 colors and can switch between them on any of its panels. However, the product we’re coming out with first will only use eight colors.

A: There are quite a few. We came out with the Gallery 3 product last year that brings full color to the e-reader platform. There are seven companies that are already interested in using it.

We also brought saturated full-color to retail, and we’re continuing to make progress in this area. I’m also really thrilled about some of the wearables like the Fossil Hybrid watch announced earlier this week. It combines fashion with the elements of great design and the use of our display.

Then there’s also the recently announced Lenovo ThinkBook Plus Twist, which spins to reveal an OLED display on one side and an e-ink display on the other.

A: Yes, we have. The energy efficiency has a lot to do with the fact that our products are relatively low voltage. There’s no power being used when a display is showing an image. We use power to update the display, and once that’s done, the display is not drawing power anymore. So a lot of the demos we carry around show full images, but we don’t actually have any power cords with us.

So a lot of the applications our products are a great fit for have a lower use cycle. Think of a retail store that only updates its prices on e-ink displays every now and then.

A: We have a product line called JustTint at E Ink, which can switch from transparent to mostly opaque. We’re continuing to advance the technology and are working with partners to bring it to market. We’ve discussed using it for automotive sunroofs, for example, which is really exciting.

So if you look at electric cars, it can get really hot when you open the sunroof, but if you then turn on the AC, you can’t drive as far because the battery life takes a hit. So with our products, you won’t have to make those tradeoffs.

A: We generally say it’s paper. We’re trying to bring additional functionality to places where people usually use paper. These include reading, note-taking, smart city signage, and retail shelf tags. These started as paper applications. We know that in some devices people choose LCD displays if they make sense for their use case, but e-ink displays can also be used in many cases and are better for our eyes.

Q: What do you see for the future? If we look 15 or 20 years down the line, do you think it will still be possible to improve your products and technology substantially?

A: Absolutely. We’re working on transparent films, which aren’t even full products yet, and we’ve just started our journey when it comes to color displays. I recently heard a quote by Bill Gates that I really liked. He said, “We overestimate what we can do in two years and underestimate what we can do in 10 years.”

We want to expand our business to cars, billboards, and more. The application of low-power full-color technology in this space is what the world needs right now.

This is just a quick overview of the conversation we had with Tim O’Malley from E Ink. If you want to learn more, check out the video at the top of the page.

A new patent shows that Apple may be working on a hybrid e-Paper and LCD display for iPad and iPhone that can switch between the two screens as needed. The patent details a multilayered screen where the entire display or just portions of it could change to offer either the incredible detail of e-Ink (a la Kindle) for text, or the LCD display for standard use.

PatentlyApple describes the feature as “a next generation iPhone that would effectively offer us a smart hybrid display that could switch between a standard LCD and an e-Paper display. In fact, it’s so smart that the display could actually subdivide itself into quadrants that could intelligently switch display types depending on the content that the user is running.”

If you have ever seen text on an Amazon Kindle, it looks extremely crisp. You can see the difference between the iPad display and Kindle screen when zoomed in at 26x here:

It’s not hard to imagine why a hybrid e-Ink & LCD display would be a huge win for future iOS devices. Paired with another recent patent that shows Apple may be bringing Thunderbolt to iPhone and iPad, the future of the iOS lineup is looking very impressive.

We"ve long pondered the possibility of an e-ink phone. One that offers enough battery life to get us to the end of the day, or maybe even the End of Days, simply by being less reliant on the power-draining frivolity of an LCD or AMOLED panel. What we didn"t envision, though, was that the first mass-produced attempt at such an idea would come from a Russian company we"d never heard of, or that it would take the particularly unusual form of the YotaPhone -- a device that does many things differently, not least in having a curved E Ink panel on its rear side. As you"re about to see, a lot of these two-faced ideas have potential, but some of them need some work -- a lot of work, in fact -- before they"re ready for prime time.

And then there"s the price tag, which may come as something of a surprise in its own right given the YotaPhone"s mid-range specs. It costs €499 in Europe, which equates to around $675 in the US (although the handset isn"t currently available there). That means you could actually buy the Yota"s two halves separately for a more affordable sum; for example, by getting a Nexus 5 and a Kindle. Nevertheless, the ability to buy the two-in-one YotaPhone is something we didn"t have a year ago, and something that isn"t offered by any other company, and so it"s worth bearing that in mind as we proceed to lay out its many flaws.

You can probably tell from the gallery above that this is a fat cuboid of a phone. It stands out for its blockiness and wide bezels, which contribute to a maximum thickness of 9.9mm (0.39 inch) and a weight of 146 grams. In terms of volume and weight, the YotaPhone is only around 15 percent bigger than the HTC One mini, which has the same 4.3-inch screen size, but it feels slightly bigger in the hand because the thickness barely tapers at the edges.

The one exception to all this rectangular-ity is to be found at the top-rear edge, which is thinner than the rest of the phone thanks to Yota Device"s most visible design flourish: a slight inward curve on the Gorilla Glass of its E Ink panel. This little detail is subtle, but people do seem to notice it -- usually around the same time that they realize they"re looking at a dual-display phone. As a result, the YotaPhone"s appearance is a great conversation-starter.

Now, chatting with strangers is nice and all, but it"s not really a reason to buy a piece of technology. Personally, we"d be a lot more ready to forgive the YotaPhone"s utilitarian appearance if its hardware lived up to that promise, but it doesn"t -- at least not in the sample we were sent for review. The wraparound plastic band that holds the two panels together has the potential to be durable, especially since it doesn"t need to make any allowance for a microSD or swappable battery, but there are visible gaps between this band and the E Ink display. The issue is worst at the top of the phone, perhaps as a knock-on effect from the curvature, to the point where you can actually see the SIM tray mechanism lurking behind the seam. Yota Devices tells us that it has fixed this issue, but we can only judge what we have in front of us. We"ll update this section when we receive an absolutely final handset, hopefully in the next few days.

For a phone that puts such a big emphasis on reading, we"d expect both displays to live up to the highest standards, but they don"t quite meet that mark. The 4.3-inch 720p LCD panel, made by Japan Display, is a lot better than some we"ve seen and it certainly feels like current technology, but its viewing angles and black levels are a touch worse than what you"d get from a bigger manufacturer like Samsung, HTC or Apple.

Things deteriorate slightly when you get to the E Ink panel on the rear. Although the contrast and 640 x 360 resolution are up to snuff, the panel occasionally suffers from severe ghosting from the previous image, such that it can look messy -- although this is more of an issue with wallpapers and other images, rather than clean text.

It"s also worth pointing out that there"s no technology here that couldn"t have been found on e-readers many years ago: no color, no video-friendly refresh rates and no glow-lighting. Neither is there touch sensitivity on this panel. This omission may have been inevitable from a manufacturing point of view, but it may determine the entire fate of this product, as it leads to all kinds of software limitations, which we"ll get to in a moment.

As a way of dealing with the lack of touch, the folks of Yota have added a capacitive area beneath the panel, which can respond to swipes, taps and holds -- gestures that mostly work OK, but which can sometimes by unresponsive. The same gestures work on an equivalent touch-sensitive area on the front face of the phone, beneath the LCD, but we eventually decided to turn on the stock Android on-screen navigation buttons instead, because, again, these swipe gestures weren"t always easy to get right.

Don"t be alarmed if you boot up the camera app only to be confronted by a black screen. It"s just your hand blocking the lens -- a lens that is placed at the bottom of the phone instead of where you"d normally find it, at the top. This may have been an inevitable consequence of the E Ink panel, which is too tall to leave space for the camera module above it, but the end result is awkward. The camera lens gets smeared more often because it"s so close to where all the swiping happens, and the border around the lens makes it hard to clean without a proper lens brush.

The camera"s position also means you have to turn the phone upside down every time you want to take a photo, and wait for the gyroscope and OS to catch up with the new orientation before you press the shutter button. Alternatively, you have to grip the phone by the edges, using just your fingertips, which doesn"t always feel quite right either.

If you can get past this early awkwardness, however, you"ll quickly come to like the stock Android camera app, which -- like the rest of YotaPhone"s operating system -- has been left largely unaltered. It"s full of speedy little shortcuts, like switching between the camera and the gallery by swiping to the left or right; and tapping and holding anywhere on the screen not only to set focus and exposure but also to bring up a radial menu for quick access to settings. The only onscreen camera buttons you need to worry about are the shutter release and a mode button to quickly switch between still photography, video and panorama. It all takes a bit of getting used to, if you"re new to stock Android, but it"s uncluttered and intelligent.

The YotaPhone"s 13-megapixel image output is of decent quality for an off-the-shelf camera module, which is a polite way of saying there"s little to report in terms of either flaws or bonuses. JPEG compression isn"t too harsh, leaving around 3.8MB of data in an average still, and the multi-exposure HDR mode usually provides images with minimal blur from handshake. Video quality is equally competent, with fast and sensible automatic adjustments, and with gentle enough compression to cope with detail and motion. The only weakness there is with the audio, which occasionally pops and also has excessive noise reduction that can make voices sound tinny. Lastly, the front-facing camera is passable, but too low-res and too highly compressed to use for anything but video chat -- output images are 1,280 x 720 and tend to be less than 200KB in size.

It"s in the software department that the YotaPhone comes alive. This is also where it dies on its feet. The predicament is simple: There"s enough pre-installed software on this phone to demonstrate that the second E Ink screen has real potential, but there"s not nearly enough support for this display to make it useful right now.

Back when the YotaPhone was still in the prototype stage, we pressed its creators over the need to somehow support Kindle and other e-reading apps. We were told that this support would come, by means of a workaround that would allow the user to trigger page-turns using swipe gestures, regardless of whether Amazon"s Kindle app ever officially supported the YotaPhone"s E Ink panel. This idea hasn"t made it through to this build, and that"s a huge limitation.

As it stands, the only way to read e-books on the YotaPhone"s E Ink screen is by means of Yota"s pre-installed app, Bookmate, which seems to only offer a handful of out-of-copyright items in English. There"s a subscription model that might help users in Russia to access a wider and more recent range of content, but it"s not available in the UK. As a result, the phone is currently useless for e-book reading -- at least until someone can find a workaround to trigger those page-turns as Yota Devices originally envisaged.(See the end of this article for a quick update on the e-book situation.)

The first method is by mirroring the LCD to the E Ink, by means of a two-finger swipe downwards on the LCD side. This is mirroring of the dumbest sort -- you"re effectively just creating a screen grab and then displaying the JPEG on the rear panel. This might have a few uses -- if you need to keep a boarding pass or some detailed info up on the screen for a while -- but those situations are rare.

The second method of sharing displays is much smarter. Apps that have been built or customized for the YotaPhone have a button in the top-right corner of the screen that triggers some function on the rear panel -- and instead of just a static image, this function can be dynamic and interactive. Equally, the YotaPhone"s customized version of Android 4.2 is able to send some notifications across automatically. The best way to illustrate this is by going through the three main pre-installed apps and functions that will be of use to an English-speaking audience.

When you get an email, text, weather alert or any other notification, the YotaPhone gives the usual audio alert and displays a summary of the notification on the rear panel. You then swipe to remove these notifications one by one.

Depending on your chosen privacy settings, you can decide how detailed a notification summary is. It can just be the number of alerts of a certain type that are awaiting your attention, or it can include sender details and the first line of content. You can also choose to treat notifications differently depending on who the sender is, by adding certain contacts to a list of people whose notifications are treated as private and kept off the permanent rear display.

You need to think carefully about the issue of privacy, because people do notice what"s written on the back of your phone -- and because the phone is so different, they often can"t help but stare. This applies to notifications, but it"s perhaps even more important with the "Organizer" app, especially if you have colleague"s appointments shown in your Google calendar.

If you can get around the privacy issue, either by keeping the phone in your pocket or just not caring about what people see on the back, then you might find it incredibly important to have an always-on agenda displayed on your phone. And this agenda is up-to-date, too: If someone adds an appointment to your calendar, it"ll show up on the E Ink panel automatically after a short delay.

The Organizer app is okay, and it offers basic control over which calendars to follow, but it can"t compete with calendar apps favored by power users. For example, there"s little ability to display to-do lists or notes alongside appointments -- they can only be shown separately, by means of a Notes app, which should really have been integrated into Organizer. This is the problem with Yota"s reliance on customized apps -- they"ll just never be up to the level of what"s available in the Google Play Store.

The YotaPhone comes with a pre-installed mapping app called MapsWithMe, which offers country-specific map downloads and seems to be relatively reliable -- at least for the small part of London geography that we tested it with. You can set pins, and home in on your position, and then hit the "Flip" button to send the map to the always-on display. From there, you can use swipe gestures to zoom in or out of the map. Unfortunately, the rate at which your position refreshes is way too slow for driving, but it"s handy enough at a walking speed.

This app can be configured to send tweets, Facebook updates and RSS feeds to your rear display. Strangely, these notifications don"t auto-update; you have to swipe to unlock the screen and then swipe again or hit the volume rocker to see the latest messages. Another limitation is that you can"t show different types of messages at the same time. This is no match for HTC"s BlinkFeed, for example, which displays tweets alongside Facebook updates and everything else. In fact, it"s hard to see how this could be called a "hub" at all.

We encountered a few bugs with our review unit. It crashed on occasion, for no obvious reason, and had to be restarted. Sometimes the lock screen was unresponsive until the display was switched off and then on again. But on the other hand, the phone"s cellular functions, WiFi, GPS and compass all seem to be reliable. The phone"s bands aren"t suited to the US, but there"s healthy support for 3G and LTE in the UK and Europe, including the key 800MHz, 1,800MHz and 2,600MHz LTE bands. On Vodafone"s LTE network in London, we had no trouble getting beyond 10 Mbps down and up with a couple bars of reception, and the phone was good at holding onto a weak LTE signal.

In terms of the main processor, we"re looking at the Snapdragon S4 Pro of yesteryear. Yota Devices originally said that the YotaPhone would come with a current-gen SoC, so we"re slightly disappointed not to get a Snapdragon 600 or even 800 in the final build. The S4 Pro"s performance isn"t bad by any stretch, with app load times and general navigation fluidity that is noticeably better than Snapdragion 400 phones like the HTC One mini, and not too far off Snapdragon 600 handsets like the Galaxy S 4 and HTC One. In fact, in terms of gaming performance as measured by 3D Mark, the YotaPhone was able to marginally beat the more recent HTC One Max, with 6987 points. Then again, a true flagship like the Sony Xperia Z1 trounces the whole lot, while also revealing that other big issue with the YotaPhone"s older processor: poor power efficiency.

With the latest chips, we"re used to seeing more than nine hours in our standard battery rundown test, rising to 12 or more hours on some flagship phones. The YotaPhone barely survived seven hours in the same test, on HSPA+ rather than LTE, and its real-world stamina was even worse. On a day with extremely light use, we"d barely make it to 11PM with any battery left. Notching up the usage slightly, by throwing in music playback over headphones, Netflix and other activities, and we struggled to make it until 8PM. It"s hard to forgive this when we"re reviewing a handset that is being sold on the basis of longer battery life.

This is an unhappy conclusion to reach, given all the technical challenges that Yota Devices has overcome in the past couple of years. But it"s unavoidable: The YotaPhone isn"t yet ready to deliver on its dual-screen promise due to various issues ranging from poor build quality to short battery life and, most importantly, an inability to make use of its rear E Ink panel except in a very limited selection of pre-installed apps. Without support for our favorite e-book and magazine platforms, or for Spotify and other streaming apps, or transport updates and Google Now (which we"re told is coming soon), there just isn"t much reason for us to flip the phone over.

What"s needed is a big push on the software front. Not just in terms of stimulating third-party app developers to take the YotaPhone seriously, but also by reducing the phone"s reliance on those developers in the first place. This might happen through better mirroring of the LCD onto the E Ink side, rather than the stagnant screengrab-mirroring we have now, alongside some kind of mapping from swipe gestures to standard navigation functions (forwards, backwards, play, pause, et cetera).

This lack of support could potentially be solved within this generation of the product, through some major software updates, but we wouldn"t rush out to buy the YotaPhone unless and until that happens. The other option is to wait for a complete hardware revision, in the hope that it"ll bring a full touch-sensitive E Ink panel or some other solution. Either way, with all the expertise Yota Devices has gained in putting this type of display into a phone, there"s a much better chance that this type of hybrid handset will one day be successful.

Update: With regards to e-book platform support on the E Ink display, Bookmate says it"s working on deals with English-language publishers in order to bring hundreds, or potentially "thousands" of copyrighted titles by mid-2014. We"re also told that the popular free Android app, FBReader, will be made to work on the YotaPhone"s rear screen any day now, bringing the ability to read non-encrypted .epub and .mobi e-books, as well as .doc and .rtf files. Meanwhile, Yota Devices says it"s "discussing potential cooperation" with Amazon in the hope of getting support for Kindle books. We"ll continue to cover these developments as and when they happen.

Regardless of its naming convention, Fossil’s latest smartwatch doesn’t have much in common with the Gen 6 or the Gen 6 Wellness edition. For starters, it won’t run on Wear OS and it will be equipped with an e-ink display, in typical Fossil Hybrid fashion.

From the images which have been released, we can see that the showcased watchface is indeed similar to that of the Gen 6 Wellness edition, but monochromatic due to the e-ink display; Fossil seems to have abandoned the staple circular widgets, which were features on the regular Gen 6 Hybrid.

Unlike its vibrant brothers, the Fossil Gen 6 Hybrid Wellness Edition — a mouthful of a name, which manages to contain two separate models within itself for extra confusion — is equipped with two physical hands to tell the time. Regardless of that, the presented watchface also shows it in a digital format for some reason.

As to the stainless steel body itself, we can observe three physical buttons, most likely a Home button and two customizable shortcut buttons, as is tradition with Fossil Hybrid models. Those are positioned on the right of the 1.1", 170p e-ink display. Oh, and by the way, it is water resistant up to 3ATM.

Fossil have gone on record to share that the watch will have a microphone and is confirmed to be capable of accepting calls and accessing Alexa. It has a haptic motor for feedback, and of course — has Bluetooth and Wi-Fi capabilities.

Fossil fans won’t be shocked by the battery life expectancy of two weeks, as that is also rather typical for the Hybrid series. The watch will be able to charge back to 80% for about 60 minutes via a magnetic charging cradle.

Naturally, the selling point here is the Wellness part. As such, the smartwatch will communicate its biometric readings through the Fossil Wellness app, which provides a ton of info for fitness enthusiasts.

The Gen 6 Hybrid Wellness Edition will be available for purchase starting January 5 over on Fossil’s official store. The body will be offered in Black, Silver or Bronze, and those can be combined with 8 different colors of 20mm bands, so you are sure to find a combination that matches your favorite tracksuit.

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It seems Dangdang is mentioned less and less these days in conversations about China’s major e-commerce players. In fact, the most recent time we mentioned the company here at Tech in Asia was to point out that its stock is one of the all-time worst performers in China’s tech sphere. But Dangdang CEO Li Guoqing hopes to turn things around a bit when the company releases a new touchscreen e-reader for the Chinese market this May.

Li announced the device in an interview with DoNews, and although he wouldn’t disclose the price, he did say that it will cost more than the first generation Doukan e-reader the company produced, which retails at 499 RMB ($79). Most of the extra price will be coming courtesy of the parts and R&D costs for the new device’s hybrid touch/e-ink screen. Li says Dangdang plans to sell the device using the pre-order model to help cut down on warehouse costs and the risks of overstocking.

Li told DoNews that the biggest threat to domestic e-readers is Apple, especially in the wake of the release of the iPad Mini. And the patent Apple just filed for a hybrid LCD/e-ink display certainly sounds like it might pose an even greater threat to Dangdang’s newest e-reader, although the Chinese company should have at least a few months before Apple can get something using its new screen onto the market. Of course, there’s always the question of competition coming from e-reader kings Amazon as well, but despite the recent rumors, the China Kindle remains ghostware at this point.

The road ahead for Dangdang looks rough, but with Apple taking a series of body blows from state media over the past month (including the most recent accusation that its app store is full of porn), perhaps the government will weaken China’s appetite for what Li sees as Dangdang’s biggest competitor. Personally, I wouldn’t bet on it, but I could be wrong.

E-ink, the company, holds the patents of the pigment core tech that makes "paper-like" displays possible and strongarms the display manufacturers and the users of their displays to absolute silence. Any research project or startup that comes up with a better alternative technology gets bought out or buried by their lawyers ASAP.

E-ink don"t make the display themselves, they make the e-ink film, filled with their patented pigment particles and sell it to display manufacturers who package the film in glass and a TFT layer and add a driver interface chip, all of which are proprietary AF and unless you"re the size of Amazon, forget about getting any detailed datasheets about how to correctly drive their displays to get sharp images.

In my previous company we had to reverse engineer their waveforms in order to build usable products even though we were buying quite a lot of displays.

With so much control over the IP and the entire supply chain and due to the broken nature of the patent system, they"re an absolute monopoly and have no incentive to lower prices or to bring any innovations to the market and are a textbook example of what happens to technology when there is zero competition.

So, when you see the high prices of e-paper gadgets, don"t blame the manufacturers, as they"re not price gouging, blame E-ink, as their displays make up the bulk of the BOM.

Tough, some of their tech is pretty dope. One day E-ink sent over a 32" 1440p prototype panel with 32 shades of B&W to show off. My God, was the picture gorgeous and sharp. I would have loved to have it as a PC monitor so I tried building an HDMI interface controller for it with an FPGA but failed due to a lack of time and documentation. Shame, although not a big loss as an estimated cost for that was near the five figure ballpark and the current consumption was astronomical, sometimes triggering the protection of the power supply on certain images.

It"s B&W and much lower contrast than current gen e-paper, but viewing angle looks great (maybe 120 degrees confirmed from the video?). They definitely need a matte surface though; that glare was terrible.

There"s tech that looks much better like eInk"s ACeP (much stronger color saturation) but it needs multiple flashing refreshes to update so it"s not feasible for interactive devices. They"re just being marketed for advertising and the like.

everytime this topic of EInk comes up, people on HN seem to claim there"s a patent thing. I ask the simple question of which patent is blocking, and I get lazy answers like patent thicket. To be frank, I suspect those who make that comment aren"t actually directly involved in the industry. I"ve been to SID and other display conferences and the real problem is physics and also lack of funding. What I know is that EInk can"t get to the lower cost pricepoint without solving the scale problem which means getting an order for millions of displays. They can"t solve cheap large panels because that would require solving yield issues which again becomes a matter of scale. Startups show up but can"t get the billion or so that"s needed to get to scale. You can see this pattern repeated with companies like Mirasol. The real problem is that nobody wants to put millions into making displays when they could get higher ROI from putting it into another hot AI/ML or internet service company.

But the narrative is, this locks out generics somehow. The new patent can"t cover the subject matter of the old patent, as its automatically prior art, so only the improvements are covered by the new patent. If the "improvements" are so minor as to be irrelevant then I don"t see how this is a real impediment to a generic. If on the other hand there"s a significant improvement, it seems like that"s really something that should be getting patent protection.

I just feel like there"s always a step missing in the usual simple descriptions of evergreening I see. Is this all just tied in with something like doctors writing brand-name prescriptions, and the brand name just gets these minor pointless "improvements," but enough to diverges away from what the generic is so it can"t be easily substituted?

To a certain degree, it doesn"t matter if your patent isn"t completely valid, or doesn"t completely match what your competitors are doing. The point is to have deeper pockets than them and be able to spend more on lawyers than them. As long as your patent lasts long enough in court to stop your competitors from doing whatever you don"t want them to do, it has achieved its goal.

Ignorant question: are you not allowed to start developing a product, or "planning" to develop a product, before a patent it infringes on expires? I see from glancing at Wikipedia that with a US patent, "making" the item is infringement, but where is the line on that? Is it that you literally can"t fully make the thing, i.e. only get 99% of the way there and you"re fine? Or is it infringement to have an on-the-record chat with a buddy that you"re thinking of working on X when the patent for X expires? (Responses in the form of LMGTFY are welcome, I couldn"t quickly figure out how to search for this.)

Lawyer-no-longer-practicing-patent-law here: You have to look at each individual, numbered claim (at the end of the printed patent). Treat each claim as its own infringement checklist, with each term in that claim as a checklist item. IF: Every checklist item in that claim is present in what you"re doing, either literally or, as an edge case, by a "substantial equivalent," a term of art; THEN: That claim is infringed. (It only takes one infringed claim for liability.)

A canonical hypothetical claim is this: "1. A seating structure comprising: (a) a generally-horizontal seating platform; and (b) at least four legs, of substantially-equal length, each affixed, substantially orthogonally, to the same side of the seating platform to extend in the same general direction relative to the seating platform."

For that hypothetical claim, a tripod-style three-legged stool with angled legs wouldn"t infringe because four legs are required for infringement. (There"d probably be an argument over whether the angled legs satisfied the "substantially orthogonally" element.)

For the same claim, suppose that you had a conventional four-legged chair with a back. That chair would infringe claim 1 because the checklist elements are all present; the addition of the back is irrelevant to the infringement analysis.

Another edge case: If you "induce" someone to infringe the claim, you"re liable as an infringer. Still another is "contributory infringement," which I won"t go into here.

No infringement there — for infringement to exist, someone has to actually make, use, sell, offer to sell, or import the subject matter of at least one issued claim of the patent.

(Usual disclaimer: I"m not your lawyer, don"t rely on this as legal advice about your specific situation, small changes in facts can sometimes make a big difference in outcome, etc.)

Generally, you can be sued for infringement whenever you make, use, etc., anything that comes within the scope of any issued, unexpired, not-yet-invalidated claim.

Generally, yes — if the chairs come within the scope of an issued, unexpired claim that hasn"t yet been invalidated, then simply making the chairs constitutes infringement of that claim.

It was a really hard problem that required totally different tooling from a normal display manufacturer so I"d absolutely expect that to be a huge source of delays in getting set up.

You can"t just convert an existing display factory to make e-ink displays, so the startup costs are huge and the odds are good that you"ll take at least a few years to work out the quirks. Probably more like 4-6... if you get lucky and can figure out what tools to use quickly.

There"s not much of a market-based solution to a legally protected monopoly. The best you can hope for is to higher demand at lower price points that makes a lower price profitable

Consider: why wasn"t Panasonic able to capture all of the patents for LCD displays? If "patents" explained the problem, then why are high-resolution color screens so cheap?

IMO, the answer to this question is that there are simply more ways to implement color LCD displays than there are ways to implement e-paper displays (as far as we know).

Other firms could design electronic-paper displays, but they"re all going to work basically the same as E-ink displays, so they"ll run afoul of E-ink"s patents.

FWIW, the LCD "tech tree" got wider after the early 1970s patents started expiring in the 1990s; that"s when LCD prices started to fall. Maybe the same will happen to e-paper when E-ink"s earliest patents start expiring, but it"s no guarantee. As long as the tech tree remains narrow, E-ink could control the market for decades more yet.

Just because someone is an innovator doesn"t mean they are for continual innovations or for the spread of innovations or like the idea of people building on their works.

I think the inventors should be rewarded, but it seems misguided to do it by making them have to exploit an exclusive hold on their invention which blockades progress. Why not just give them prize money? You could set objective standards whereby a new invention that gets produced over X quantity by any party gets Y prize money.

For example, if a technology took ten years and ten billion dollars to develop to the point of it being commercially viable, well, yeah, a patent-protected monopoly is likely the ethically correct privilege the inventors should be granted.

An example (out of many) of bullshit patents and monopolies that should have never been granted are the horseshit patents Color Kinetics got years ago. These people had the audacity to patent the use of pulse-width-modulation to control the intensity of LEDs and make lights that could produce different colors. The patent office granted these people patent after patent. Once they had enough they started to attack the entire LED industry. Philips ended-up acquiring them. They let the industry know they would not enforce the bullshit patents. Still, the crooks took their thievery all the way to the bank.

As for the relative cost of LCD"s vs. E-ink. I think the primary difference is very simple: Volume. I haven"t done the numbers, but I think I can say that the LCD industry is at least 1,000 times larger in volume. It"s like the LCD vs. OLED comparison. Volume is king.

Another element is the tooling-up for manufacturing. A modern LCD manufacturing plant runs in the billions. Two billion dollars the last time I checked, but I haven"t been in the industry for ten years and have lost touch. You are not going to take a multi-billion-dollar factory and slice-off a corner to make e-ink displays. These factories are highly automated and tuned machines. They are designed to make millions of displays per month.

This means that making e-ink displays requires putting-up a specialized factory or retooling an old LCD factory that might no-longer be competitive for making LCD"s. Regardless of the approach, this is likely to be a very expensive undertaking. That, coupled with lower volume, is guaranteed to translate into higher prices.

Disclaimer: I was in the high performance display business for ten years. Exited a decade ago. So, yeah, I am a little disconnected as to the latest and greatest and what might be new in manufacturing. That said, I get the sense that material changes haven"t been as significant in the last ten years as they were during the prior ten.

Anyone who simplifies businesses along any line on a monochromatic plane has never run enough of a business to fully understand just how complex things can be. They grab one variable (minimum wage, taxes, regulations, oil, etc.) and think it can be manipulated without it affecting the aforementioned multivariate equation.

A sad example of this just took place a few weeks ago in California. I think it was in San Diego that the politicians decided grocery workers had to have a $4 per hour "hero" raise due to working through COVID. While everyone could agree that there are people who made sacrifices for the rest of us, as I learned to say, some problems don"t pass math and physics. the end result was that the Kroger company, which owns Ralphs and a bunch of other brands, closed four stores (maybe 2, don"t remember) because there was no way they could keep the doors open if they paid everyone an extra $4 per hour. So, a forced wage raise actually destroyed jobs --and this happened nearly instantly-- and people who had work found themselves on the street.

Still, it sucks that people lost their jobs this way. We need a system where politicians suffer real consequences for their actions. Not sure what this would look like, but it sounds good.

What we don"t know is if the $4/hr hike caused employers to have to reduce worker hours, shift people to part-time basis, etc. Maybe that information will come out at some point.

That means the store has to INSTANTLY generate at least 33% more in profits (not sales, profits) in order to cover that increase. I don"t know any business that can simply will a 33% increase in performance. This is where political thinking quickly becomes delusional. And, no, they are not sitting on fat margins that would allow absorbing such a thing.

That is one thing I got my reMarkable2 for. It is a great device and very useful. But one thing stands out: it runs Linux and offers you shell access. You can just upload your own programs to it and tweak many things. Even just having the ability to upload your own "power off" picture to it is a really nice thing[1]. If the makers of the reMarkable would push a bit more into the direction of enabling users to create software, as in documenting the system and creating APIs/libraries to use for integration into the existing software stack, this could grow enormously. The hardware is great, now comes the software.

What I dream of, would be scenarios which make great use of the always-visible screen content. Like a dashboard which shows you your upcoming appointments, unread notifications, perhaps just the weather status. It refreshes every 5 minutes but otherwise doesn"t consume energy or distract you with animations. Or being able to control the e-Reader from your computer. Reading a man-page? Why not send it to the e-Ink screen and have it displayed there until some other content is sent? Like a book which you keep open beside your computer, just remotely configurable. So much things could be done by just adding software to existing e-Ink hardware. And if such an environment grows, probably so will the hardware offerings targeting this market.

That"s surprising, since I was always under the impression that E-Ink displays were pretty low-power. Is it the drawing of the new image that requires so much energy in a small instant?

Although they never said it outright, it sounded like the main deterrent is just anyone else making money with an angle Disney hadn"t explored. It sounds similar to eInk refusing millions if it means someone else makes a greater fortune.

* Their manufacturing capacity is finite and not easily scaled, so they couldn"t actually deliver on a hypothetical millions-of-screens-per-year order.

* Some sort of brand protectionism. I see a lot of "we could probably hack and rig an E-ink display to do something outside its normal sales case" discussion. I could imagine a situation where they ended up-- in the eyes of end consumers-- responsible for the failings of such products. They never said to use their panel as a desktop monitor for playing 60fps video, but they can"t stop someone from trying and then bellyaching about it to the world.

Again, I think it"s...rather a lot of hubris to assume that a company is doing the less profitable thing (and it is an assumption, since none of us have better data than they do).

If you"re saying that even holding a monopoly, the most profitable price point is at market saturation, I"d need to see something backing that. And also what you mean by market saturation; the cost of parts for an iPhone 11 Pro is estimated to be ~$490. The list price is, what, $1100? You"re basically saying that either they"ve already achieved market saturation, and would gain no new customers dropping the price to $600 (parts + $100 for distribution, assembly, etc), or that they"re leaving money on the table. I find both of those very hard to believe. So maybe I"m misunderstanding you?

Software patents are the ones that make no sense because software is already protected by copyright and patents were never intended to protect algorithms.

So, less jobs, less innovation, less sharing of development, and more duplication of security efforts that are shared by every company. Getting rid of patents would be a recipe for further entrenching existing wealth. You"d have no protection from a major corporation replicating your garage-company"s processes. As it is, companies have a hard enough time fending off the likes of China which does not respect western IP.

Wow, that is a very serious allegation. But I googled and googled and googled, and found not even one such lawsuit. I also see competing tech like Clearink. Could you show us proof that what you claimed about "buried by their lawyers" is actually occurring?

So yes the patent is responsible for the existence of the monopoly, but it is also responsible for the existence of the product that the monopoly is built upon.

I think a 10 year limit on the monopoly is a good compromise (which is basically what the patent system is already doing). Even with those companies patenting DNA... after 10 years the argument is over.

Conversely, I find it hard to justify the cost of an iPad, becuase I already have a phone and several laptops. I can"t see a situation where a tablet would be more useful to me, so I"ve never bought one.

Turns out different people have different needs, and the e-ink note-taking market caters to that. Most people would find an iPad more useful, so they"re lower cost.

The real game changer was when I started taking the iPad to the gym and putting it on the elliptical and could do required reading or rewatch classes.

There was a positive reinforcement loop of wanting to run a certain amount but then also wanting to stay on long enough to finish a chapter and then once again figuring I should run just a little longer and get ahead in class.

I have the first generation, and I do enjoy it. However, I think a distinction is _how_ one takes notes. For brainstorming, and just writing free-form, it"s great. However, I find it really annoying for taking notes about a doc, for two reasons:

- If you need more notes than fit in the margins and whitespace of a PDF, are you going to flip between the doc and a separate file of notes? What if you want to compare two documents, and take notes about the distinct ways two authors discuss the same material? The idea that you can"t have more than one thing open feels immediately limiting.

- If you"re several pages into a doc and want to flip back to some prior point (and you don"t recall the specific page number), it"s actually pretty awkward.

I feel like these devices are on the cusp of being much more satisfying. But at present, either I print out all but one thing which I can deal with on the remarkable, or I end up looking at a combination of a laptop and the remarkable, and in either case, I can"t help feeling that an obvious use case was not well considered.

Considering how small the company behind it is compared to Apple, I was positively surprised how well it is designed and made - in some aspects I consider it superior to the iPad. Apple can fund a lot or R&D thanks to the volume of iPad sales, a small company has much more problems to do so. And probably the reMarkable sales numbers are small compared to the iPad. At least they were able to bring down prices quite a bit with the second generation. To be honest, I wouldn"t have paid much more than the 400€ for the device.

I don"t like the flaky sync but love seeing my drawings as PDFs. The LiveView function almost doesn"t work but a third party app allows me to display the tablet on the desktop for Zoom meetings.

Arxiv PDFs are easy to read only if you crop or zoom, which is a bit unfortunate. I would have loved integration with Pocket, Dropbox, Arxiv and other sources. There"s no TTS option, which is also unfortunate, because I find TTS doubles my focus when reading technical text.

Have you tried another PDF reader, like KOReader[0] or plato[1]? There"s also [2] which looks really interesting for cases where you want to save time.

I am thinking about getting one (or one of a couple other similar options), because I think it would be MUCH more comfortable for reading and annotating papers, which is my main practical use case for an iPad. And if it"s at all a decent replacement for a paper notebook, that would reduce the number of things in my bag.

But I"m also a bit worried that the organizational features might be lacking. Specifically, it sounds like there"s no fulltext search feature, and syncing has to be done through their cloud service, which sounds troublesome because I"ve already got a system and encompasses file types and tools that ReMarkable doesn"t handle.

It feels wonderful for him to use, as opposed to the iPad which makes me feel like I"m rotting his brain. After a half hour of using the ipad, he"s irritable and throws a tantrum when it"s time to put it away. With the remarkable it"s just like a pad of paper, but I don"t have to worry about him getting ink on my bedspread.

The iPad has the Apple Pencil and it"s not bad but for everything else the iPad is far better. You can annotate a pdf and send it somewhere else in different ways. It can take a or download a picture and mark it up. With the appstore it can handle and convert just about any file type. It also does a million other things like web