I recently bought a Boox Palma, which is a phone-size Android device with a real E-Ink display.
It's not a phone (WiFi/Bluetooth only, no mobile radio), and with 4-bit greyscale it's definitely an adjustment to use with a lot of apps (it has per-app DPI & contrast controls to help), but they've done a lot of work on the refresh rate to make it feel responsive.
It even has midrange-phone specs (SD 6xx series CPU, 6GB RAM, 4Ah battery), with full Google Play, so it's a quite usable Android device overall. Like most modern E-Ink devices, has a CCT warm-to-cool frontlight, so great for night-time use.
Now would I want to use it as my only, everyday device (if it was a phone too)? Probably not. Could I? Almost certainly.
Colour E-Ink is still quite limited (in contrast, and resolution), but I expect the patents on that are quite a bit newer and we won't be seeing so much movement in that area so soon.
I really wanted YotaPhone to succeed. Both a normal screen and a very very battery friendly e-ink for reading etc for hours...
I love my Boox Note 3. It's am older device but still gets updates lots of tweaks for tuning the display on a per app basis, runs Google apps etc. I use it mainly as a reader for books and manga but also for drawing notes and browsing the Web.
Ooh, looks interesting. Though the size would be a disadvantage to me—I can imagine some situations where using an ereader is acceptable where a phone would not be, and other people won't be able to tell them apart this way.
Honestly if the Palma would have cellular radio it would check all my phone need boxes.
Colour eink is still very limited, but can't they make eink (semi-)transparent? Just put eink above the usual LCD/oled and enable/disable them as needed?
I recently bought a Boox Palma, which is a phone-size Android device with a real E-Ink display.
It's not a phone (WiFi/Bluetooth only, no mobile radio), and with 4-bit greyscale it's definitely an adjustment to use with a lot of apps (it has per-app DPI & contrast controls to help), but they've done a lot of work on the refresh rate to make it feel responsive.
It even has midrange-phone specs (SD 6xx series CPU, 6GB RAM, 4Ah battery), with full Google Play, so it's a quite usable Android device overall. Like most modern E-Ink devices, has a CCT warm-to-cool frontlight, so great for night-time use.
Now would I want to use it as my only, everyday device (if it was a phone too)? Probably not. Could I? Almost certainly.
Colour E-Ink is still quite limited (in contrast, and resolution), but I expect the patents on that are quite a bit newer and we won't be seeing so much movement in that area so soon.
I really wanted YotaPhone to succeed. Both a normal screen and a very very battery friendly e-ink for reading etc for hours...
I love my Boox Note 3. It's am older device but still gets updates lots of tweaks for tuning the display on a per app basis, runs Google apps etc. I use it mainly as a reader for books and manga but also for drawing notes and browsing the Web.
Ooh, looks interesting. Though the size would be a disadvantage to me—I can imagine some situations where using an ereader is acceptable where a phone would not be, and other people won't be able to tell them apart this way.
Honestly if the Palma would have cellular radio it would check all my phone need boxes.
Colour eink is still very limited, but can't they make eink (semi-)transparent? Just put eink above the usual LCD/oled and enable/disable them as needed?