Pixel Qi Introduces a DIY Kit

jones_supa writes "Pixel Qi has just revealed their DIY kit for netbooks, planned to be out near the end of Q2 — sounds like June. This makes it possible to retrofit a screen to one fully readable in direct sunlight. In her blog, Mary Lou Jepsen says: 'It’s only slightly more difficult than changing a lightbulb: it’s basically 6 screws, pulling off a bezel, unconnecting the old screen and plugging this one in. That’s it. It’s a 5 minute operation.' She also talks about the 'laptop hospital,' a service depot started by kids in Africa."

Comments

Re:ignoramus

[marcansoft]

It's in B&W without backlighting / in the sunlight. It's in full color with the backlight on and at moderate to low ambient light, and somewhere in between as you reduce the backlight level and increase the abient level. Which is pretty good, considering that most laptop screens are fairly unusable in direct sunlight.

She was joking

[gmuslera]

Now we can begin our own "How many netbook owners does it takes to change a lightbulb" jokes.

Re:As opposed to those of us with regular notebook

[SpinyNorman]

This isn't a generic LCD display - that's not their market.

The big deals with the Pixel Qi display is that:

- It's totally usable in full sunlight
- It's full color and fast (OK for video)
- It has a reflective e-ink mode
- It's low power

It's really geared towards:

1) eBook readers that want color and video support
2) Laptops/netbooks intended to be used outside (which tends to mean smaller form factor)

They use the same production line as traditional LCDs though (there's lots of articles / videos on them if you Google), so they'll certainly be able to produce larger sizes if they want to.

Re:Slashdotted?

[xlotlu]

It's hosted on yahoo servers. That's more than unfortunate... it's sad.

Humanity at its finest:

[Hurricane78]

This group of girls armed with screwdrivers starting taking apart the laptops and reseating the cables. Sometimes they'd change out a screen, or a speaker. They learned about the hardware of their laptops. They got to see what was inside. They got better and better at fixing things by learning as they went.

5-11 years old. Not told by anything to do so but in their own interest. Sorry, but that’s humanity at its finest.
If I learned one thing about our abilities, it’s to simply assume you can do it. I see so many people who say and think that they can’t do this and can’t do that.
We all are incredibly intelligent. Everyone can fix electronics. Everyone can write software. Everyone can learn quantum physics!
It’s just a matter of allowing oneself to assume that one is able to do it. And then do it.
That one rule, worked for me my whole life. :)

Ministers of Education had a tough time believing that these girls could fix the hardware, so they would visit - to see it with their own eyes - and start thinking differently about maintenance of hardware.

And here we see that exact mindset of “we can’t”. Just as most people here would assume a 5 year old girl couldn’t fix a computer. Let alone one from a 3rd world rural area.
Turns out that’s bullshit! :)

Man, if everyone could just see the tiny box of social conditioned pointless rules that he is caught in... “You can’t do that! Only rich good looking men get girls! Obey! Buy, buy, consume and buy! You are ugly! There is another side, that is against you! Believe! You must do this, and must not do that! ... ”

Re:Humanity at its finest:

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to believe everyone can learn quantum physics. That is what I literally said to people.

Then I started tutoring at a community college, and got hit with a big reality bat.

For a lot of these older people, they have an incredibly difficult time remembering to do the same thing to both sides of an equation. And don't even get me started on them figuring out how to manipulate negative numbers for adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing. *shudder*

The best they can do is try to memorize lists of rules and apply them. Developing an intuition for things is way beyond them now. Not only that, but they never learned how to think for themselves, so they will never teach themselves anything, ever. Which means they require constant hand-holding through every class. Their strategy is essentially to attempt to memorize how to do every possible problem that could be on the exams, instead of just learning the concepts and applying them dynamically.

Sure, maybe if they spent their whole lives using their brain properly, maybe they could learn this stuff now. But I seriously think that their brains just can't handle learning things much at all anymore. They let their minds atrophy and the best they can hope for is holding off dementia.

If you think you can teach them quantum physics, have at it. I'm not stopping you.

The lesson I got from it is that if you want to know how to do stuff, keep your brain active your whole life, and learn things as you go. Your brain can and will, in a way, forget how to learn things, if you don't exercise it regularly.

And this isn't even accounting for the people who have had physical trauma causing brain damage. I've tried to help people like that, one person who actually got real migraines after thinking for over a half hour. On the one hand, I applaud them, because they are trying their best to do what they can to make the best of the situation. On the other hand, it is just sad watching them, because they are never, ever going to do it, without some kind of specialized therapy.

Re:What kind of business model do they have?

[icegreentea]

A whole bunch of Pixel Qi running devices were demoed at CES this year. We'll probably never see half of them again, but the rest are all presumably coming out sometime. This shit is friggin NEW. Hasn't really been time to integrate into most laptop lines yet. My bet is that the high-end laptops will start offering this as an option soon enough.

And there are a few downsides. I'm assuming that they are still more expensive than a plain LCD screen. But from what I can remember from the CES videos, there's a distinct yellowish tint to the display (in color/video mode). It was very much as if it was all printed on newsprint. Now, nothing wrong with that for what the screen does, but I cannot see manufacturers pushing out a yellow tinted display across all their lines. There would be... backlash.

Re:Slashdotted?

[bpkiwi]

Only the people who comment don't read the article. This is mostly because of the moderation system - if you stop to read the article then your comment will appear to late to gather any mod points - thus you are lost in the +1 noise. Only by jumping in as soon as you see something posted and saying something pointless, uninformed, and inane will you have a chance of getting moded to +5 by your peers - who also didn't read the article.