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Comment by joecool1029 | Hacker News Reader

Still wondering why Pixel Qi failed. It's the one piece of tech in the past decade I keep going back to. The founders went off to Google X and the patents were snatched up by the EFF co-founder and openly licensed in the past year.

It was not e-ink but a reflective panel viewable in bright daylight that also had a backlight for indoor/night use. They had a 10" netbook panel commercially available.

It makes me wonder if reading about another exciting screen tech such as this will suffer the same fate. Maybe someone else knows why.

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Pixel Qi struck me as overhyped. It was just a regular transflective LCD panel that the founder of OLPC, Nick Negroponte wanted to exploit to get massive funding (from big orgs like the UN, the easily confused ministers of education in developing countries) for his pet project that flew him around the world giving talks and hanging out with popstars who all claim they're doing it to save children in the developing world. If you google Nick Negroponte now, he seems to now claim that he invented or was a key factor in the tablet computing revolution, touchscreens, and VR. http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1329725&print=yes

Interesting. I knew about transflective screens and miss them from my early cellphones. I guess I need to read what the patents pertain to. A list is here: http://www.toad.com/20141209-dpl-patents.pdf

People want this. Anyone who wants the ability to take a small laptop outside on a nice day and be able to read the screen wants this. I don't particularly care about Negroponte's goals with OLPC but it did bring some technology into discussion that isn't typically used on mobile devices (lithium iron phosphate batteries being another thing to use for rugged outdoors devices...)

Digging up a bit more research it seems Toshiba was the last to use transflective in an ultraportable size. Here's one in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXO7u6bzVGQ

I've wondered that myself. It seemed promising.

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