In terms of your comment that it requires a little bit more energy for continued display, this isn't really the full story. The article states that this small update is only required once every 15 minutes, but my guess is the vast majority of E-Ink applications have use cases where the screen is updated more frequently anyway (e.g. for e-readers you are rarely going to spend more than 15 mins on a page).

It is relevant for use cases like persistent artwork or ambient always-on displays, but I think for most of the common e-paper use cases it's a moot point.

They way they phrase it it looks like you can choose the color for all the pixels (i.e. a black/white or green/white or red/white display).

I hope I'm just misreading it.

True, it would be interesting to know how much this would improve a typical ereaders battery life considering they are very good already.

But wouldn’t eink already be a huge win anywhere battery life is concerned? Having my ereader last for 3 weeks instead of 2 weeks isn’t really all that compelling

My understanding is that E-Ink holds all of the patents and is preventing any further competition or innovation.

Worse, it's like they are developing something but not releasing it intentionally.

Even the fast repaint algorithms are proprietary and not licensed to everyone. My Kobo Glo HD is advertising 50% faster page repaint with the new software. Amazon Kindle is using another algorithm, which is way different.

Worse, the algorithms (called waveforms) are just pieces of software which are CPU architecture specific. They even don't port these algorithms between CPU architectures.

Dasung seems to be pushing the envelope -- they claim (and have video as proof) their upcoming Not-eReader has a much better refresh rate than your usual eReader. I am really excited about that device -- not because of the refresh but because it's a full Android tablet and a HDMI monitor. I will use it as a secondary screen for the One Mix Yoga 2S. How handy the first Core CPU, fast (aka non-eMMC) storage 7" laptop to have a HDMI output... I always have an eReader with me because I like to read on transit, so whenever oncall hits (oncall incidents are months apart, so it's not too bad being on call) I can just pull out the tiny laptop, plug the monitor in and I have pretty decent screen real estate for a bit of emergency debugging.