My favourite e-ink application was in the Yotaphone II [1] some years ago, but sadly discontinued. I had one sent from the UK to Australia, where I was working for a few years. Reading books, docs or emails via the e-ink screen was a joy (no probs with bright sunshine), as was calling up your airline pass on the screen and turning off the phone, because the image on the back was retained. Even writing emails/docs was fine for me, despite the e-ink lag. I needed to charge it only every other day, and that still left plenty of margin. Best phone I ever had.
At the beginning of 2020, I worked on a project to create a status indicator for real life, to help people in the office communicate whether it's okay to interrupt them or not. We ended up using a Pimoroni Inky with Raspberry Pi to auto-sync calendar/Slack status - easy to work with and reasonably pretty.
Of course, we didn't have a chance to deploy it before the pandemic hit, but someday I'll come back to it...
Yes, I just got my Badger W few days ago and I'm pairing it with a temperature/humidity/CO2 sensor - I designed and 3D printed a bracket for it, I'm going to mount it on a wall in my kitchen. It's also going to show brief weather forecast and the current price of my energy tariff(it changes daily).
I have a badger2040, looping through a few different screens - one with a QR code pointing to my linkedin. The lack of integrated battery is annoying though - either you stick a potentially hazardous one to the back, or you're carrying around a bulky AAA enclosure.
I did a desk calendar that looks like an old Mac: https://github.com/EngineersNeedArt/SystemSix