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Yota Phone Launches With Secondary E-Ink Display
OldJuke writes "Called the YotaPhone, the device pairs a traditional LCD color touch-screen on one side with a black-and-white, electronic-paper display on the other, allowing users to continuously view data in real time without having to constantly wake up their phones and drain their batteries. General interaction will be done through the LCD screen, but the e-paper display allows an image to be displayed at all times — from maps, airline boarding passes and family photos to Twitter messages and emails — but only uses power when the picture changes. BBC News interviewed the company's leader, Vlad Martynov, for a hands-on demonstration."
I've been asking for one of these for years. Battery drain on a LCD screen is too high for a phone, eink makes a much better screen.
I like having a working phone after the inevitable drop, which means putting it in a case. This phone looks cool, but unless it's built to be durable without an additional case, or they have a custom case to make both screens usable, I'm no interested.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
Shouldn't the headline read: "With Secondary E-Ink Display YOTA Phone Launches"
"Smart phone wars begun they have."
e-ink display lasts even not powered, so one day you may have something personal/compromising/secret displayed there and if a bug freeze the phone you won't be able to erase that quickly by shutting it off, as one can do with LCD or OLED display.
I want both the things you ask for and:
Touch screen also needs to be on the eInk side too. As it currently is, you do swipe gestures below the screen to operate it, which makes it not good for lots of things.
(Also nice to have, ditch the Google part of Android and gives us a clean Android install. My wife just flipped when I told her what she'd been watching on Youtube on her Android tablet. She never realized it records everything you do and associates it with the Google account).
An app that displays the cover of the book you're reading on the LCD side.
It kills the battery but oh! the conversations you'll strike up on the subway!
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Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
I've had LCD displays crash "on" on my Android and the only way to turn it off was to remove the battery physically. Some phones have non-removable batteries making this an existing problem.
Most scanners at airports and movie theatres I've gone to are all geared to read paper tickets, and require all sorts of intervention when you try to use the airline's app to display your e-boarding pass. e-paper would be a lot easier to read than LCD.
Magic doesn't work in my presence. My power of disbelief is too strong.
Given the average update frequency and lack of greyscaling, I don't think anyone's going to be watching pr0n on these.
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It's not e-ink, but Nokia also solves this problem to some degree by switching the screen into a low power state, turning off a lot of the pixels and reducing the available colours. This allows you to have a clock, notifications and even a background image visible all the time when the screen is 'off' without draining much battery power.
Smart Watches are meant to fill the same function, and some (like the Pebble) use e-Ink.
Myself, I don't find the battery drain for turning on the screen a moment significant enough to matter.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Cases are for iPhones and similarly fragile design statements - a phone should not need one. This does put some constraints on the freedom the designers have - no glass to the edge, a buffer zone between fragile materials and the casing (which should not be made of a fragile material), etc. As the phone is first and foremost a tool this is not an unreasonable restriction.
We use Motorola Defy phones here on the farm. They seem to survive just fine without needing a case. They look rather similar to most touchscreen phones so the compromises needed for survivability are not that onerous.
--frank[at]unternet.org
where TF do you put the battery in?
Great! Now everyone on the bus will see on the e-ink display what I am doing on the LCD. All the private messages, photos, etc.
So a plastic dummy version of this phone for kids could be called TOYOTA.
Motorola had made one - and it was dirt cheap - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Fone
It was around 30$ without a contract if I remember correctly.
I have absolutely eaten 50% of my battery in a two hour long meeting because I was constantly paging through documents of notes during the discussion. Most of it is spent with the document just sitting on the display for reference / discussion. I leave the LCD on because I have to keep unlocking the phone with my pin every time someone asks something like "what was that number from March?" This would also make reading more practical, as I often do not do any e-reading during the day because I am worried about battery life over 12hrs.
neorush
That's why we have ASCII 'art' :)
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
I hear that paper has the same issue, that if you print out something compromising, someone might see it before it can be erased...
Yes, why don't many more devices use the Pixel Qi display? You know, the one that's a normal color LCD when backlit, or a monochrome very-low-power LCD when front-lit (ie, by ambient lighting). Seems like it would be ideal for phones and smart watches.
Spoken like somebody who wasn't introduced to digital porn until after 1995.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
You also hear that you can burn/shred/scrap the paper, would you do so with your smartphone ?
I've had LCD displays crash "on" on my Android and the only way to turn it off was to remove the battery physically. Some phones have non-removable batteries making this an existing problem.
You can restart a phone with non-removable batteries by holding the power button for 15~30 seconds (time depends on the model). It works at the hardware level, so even crashed/frozen ones will restart.
That's where you're wrong. Move with the times.
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