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by r00fus 4977 days ago
Isn't e-ink one of the main reasons the Pebble [1] got $10M in funding?

There's a lot of conjecture in this article - it mentions it "may" be able to make a shatterless e-ink device, or e-ink "could be" made more responsive. Not promising.

In addition what does this gain? Apple pretty much set the standard with glass multitouch displays years ago, and I have yet to see a popular plastic touchscreen phone display recently (scratching and smears are two big problems).

It will be interesting to see what the prototype can offer (as I await my Pebble as well).

[1] http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/597507018/pebble-e-paper...

2 comments

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

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.
No, that was a big confusion about it. It's actually transflective LCD. Nothing to do with e-ink.