SunBook – Sunlight Readable Netbook (2014)
cloversystems.designscience.info
cloversystems.designscience.info
It seems that there's still some movement in the transflective screen space, but always in other devices.
If someone here in HN has the money and the willpower to do it, it would be more than enough to provide screen replacements for thinkpads and other popular laptops IMO.
I currently do some work in the outdoors. I love to somewhere surrounded by nature, open my laptop and use my phone as hotspot, but I feel the fatigue after some time.
A transflective screen for my x260 could be a game changer. A color e-ink with a decent refresh rate too (although improbable, but there's a community trying to make it real https://forum.ei2030.org/t/proposal-ei-2030-the-community-bu...).
I've been looking for this kind of solutions for years, and it seems there's plenty of people looking for something similar too.
I think this has more value than just working somewhere in the arms of nature. The fact that we no longer see sunsets as often as we should and with mobile phones and modern IPS panel screens constantly feeding daylight (morninglight) spectrum through our eyes into our brains, we stifle our body clock [1] too easily.
A screen that works outside of the covered space or even in the sunroom of my house would mean a lot. It will offer better sleep patterns than today.
[1] https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2017/press-releas...
I live in Spain and it would be really nice being able to do some light work outside in the sun. You can do it with some regular laptops (especially with HDR displays) but it will kill battery life and you'll still end up squinting. It's really sad that PixelQi went out of business.
I always hated the Surface Pro style tablets. Or those Apple keyboards for the iPad. I've tried them but sold them again, they were a horribly unstable contraption.
For me a laptop has the keyboard firmly attached to the screen at all times :) Especially for portable use.
Making a quality transflective screen suitable for laptops and having good viewing angles is a complex manufacturing process; companies are working on it. I hope in the future this becomes viable.
At EI2030, we are working on making an open-source and open-hardware e-ink laptop and tackling the challenges. Our first pre-prototype Archer is almost complete, and we are going to start working on our second prototype.
Github to Archer: https://github.com/EI2030/Archer
Talk at foss-north 2021, "Building an Open-Source Eink Laptop." https://foss-north.se/2021/speakers-and-talks.html#asoto
Zulip community dedicated to the project https://ei2030.zulipchat.com/
Instead, get a Yogabook C930 with a dual display eInk + color, and touch + pen support on both screens. Great for notetaking in portrait mode: looks like a book, you write with the pen on the eink side while reading PDF or websites on the other side. Smaller than a macbook air or an ipad. Feels lighter too when held like a book in portrait mode.
Better: Fold over to use eink as the main display in mirror mode after updating the drivers. This suspend the color display to save battery. Ideal with a bluetooth or mechanical USBC keyboard: 2 USB-C ports for charging and connecting a peripheral at the same time.
Get the APAC model for 8GB Ram + multiband LTE.
Review and picture on https://little-beans.net/review/yogabook-c930/
Linux driver is WIP on https://github.com/aleksb/yogabook-c930-linux-eink-driver
Get a USBC mechanical keyboard if that's your thing ; an amd64 tablet with a eink display and enough ports to connect a mechanical keyboard is quite unique.
If you plan to use it as a "laptop", you are missing 95% of the usecase: it's for taking notes with the wacom pen (55% of my use) and using the eink screen as the main screen with a physical keyboard (40% of my use).
The remaining 5% is using the touch keyboard to type a login when I can't be bothered to grab my laptop in the next room
But hopefully some day something like this will come.
I can comment on the ergonomics of the GPD MicroPC, which I got a few days ago and have been using ever since: it's awesome. I can do about 50 wpm on the thumb keyboard, which I'm sure is as good as I ever got on those tiny EeePC keyboards. It's very satisfying to hold and use, and it comfortably supports a full Plasma desktop. Look no further for a pocket laptop.
I used to have an Apple “MacBook” which at 2 lbs (900 g) was great for carrying around, flying all over the world, etc. As I develop in Emacs, development was great, though complication was slow; I’d often compile in the cloud. It was a great machine. I use an m1 air these days which is half a pound heavier and is a great development machine.
Despite what I said about crappy virtual keyboards I am typing this comment on about 450 g of ipad.
Actually, let's try it:
#include <stdio.h>
int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
while(1) {
printf("All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy!\n");
}
}
It looks cool, but a bit casual.
What killed the netbook was the ultrabook -- similar weight and battery life, but with a larger display and full size keyboard.
Now you can get a reasonable entry level laptop for more or less the same price, so, even if the name is no longer a thing, the product is still quite available.
My Asus S6 is also quite alright (with a keyboard case).
If I would be starting from scratch today I would probably get an Air or a Surface.
I remember trying to buy an eeePC in a computer store and when I said it is for programming the guy there didn't want to sell me one but tried to sell me a 17" monstrosity. But I needed it for travel and to do office and coding work and most of the time I used SSH to a more powerful PC anyway.
The only stupid thing was that Microsoft artificially limited netbooks to low resolution and low RAM. You could apparently either build a netbook, or a fully-featured laptop, but not a small-format laptop without getting some kind of license penalty. Same a couple of years later when Intel and MS mandated that Ultrabooks have glossy touchscreens and motion sensors and could be maxially X mm thick.
My EePC was better than what I have now, at least it had a matte screen and 12 hours battery life with a replacement battery, but unfortunately was stolen.
GPD: https://www.gpd.hk/product
One Netbook: https://1netbook.com/
Both companies typically launch new products with a kickstarter/promo on Indiegogo, to generate buzz, then sell through retail channels such as DroiX: https://droix.net/ and Ali Express.
Support is ... well, it's what you'd expect for a smallish Chinese company launching via a kickstarter. On the other hand, their machines are fairly well-designed and well-made (for products from a smallish Chinese etcetera): I'm currently running a One Netbook One Mix 4, a 10" ultrabook (quad-core i7, 16Gb RAM, 1Tb SSD) with about the same footprint as an old Asus Eeee PC 1000, but much much thinner, lighter, and more powerful -- it works fine.
It also was produced right when Android 2.x was being phased on, Android 3 was not being adopted and Android 4+ was still around the corner.
Supposedly the company behind them, Notion Ink, produced a couple other devices despite such a horrific launch with the Adam, but I stopped paying attention as I would never send them another cent after my poor experience, which I chalk up to a learning experience on my part on who to trust with my money.
Because they were of poor quality, poor reliability and high cost. The Jepsen reality distortion field only lasted for about a year.
Sometimes it takes a few iterations to get the production process right. Maybe if Mary Lou Jensen’s reality distortion field had lasted a bit longer we would all have been better off.
I, for one, would buy one of these things in a minute if they were still available.
Which one? I saw XO and it was terrible. I am genuinely curious, did you actually use it actively? Because a lot of people take a quick look and then use their first impression. My meaning of terrible is that it was unusable compared to an equivalent LCD of the same price (I have to guess based on what I was told was the actual selling price of the overall product, about USD$250 in 2008 since OLPC was never transparent about their costs and Quanta holds such data tight). It had lower resolution. Lower brightness and color gamut in normal mode. Lower contrast in reflective mode.
> Mary Lou Jensen’s reality distortion field had lasted a bit longer we would all have been better off
I doubt it. btw, it is Jepsen, not Jensen. I work in the display industry. Most of the experts I talked to were surprised that anyone thought it would be successful. Which explains why the only investors were unsophisticated decision makers from UN. The millions wasted on it were taken from developing countries. That's a shame. Jepsen left the industry and now works on "practical telepathy". I think it is easier to shift the reality distortion field to a new set of victims than it is to actually make genuine improvements to a technology.
The OLPC as a whole was a mixed bag; a successful experiment, I think, even if the project was a bit of a fiasco. The keyboard was trash, not just because of its size, but because the rubberized keys would frequently fail to capture key presses. The OS they released was buggy and poorly conceived in many ways. The OLPC was also released right before cheap netbooks and tablets hit the market, obviating the project's main value proposition.
But other things worked well, and the screen was one of them, at least for my purposes. I lived in Miami at the time, and it was only with the OLPC laptop that I was able to code while sitting out on my porch. I fixed the keyboard problem by plugging a mechanical keyboard into the USB port, and avoided the custom OS by dropping into the shell and telnetting into my workstation. Even with those awkward hacks, I still enjoyed coding on it because it let me do something I couldn't do otherwise.
The relative cost of the screen wasn't an issue for me. I would have paid quite a bit more than I did, just to have a working laptop (or even a terminal) that was usable in the bright sunlight. And buying an OLPC was meant to be more of a charitable gift anyway.
From your comments on Jepsen, it sounds to me like one of the challenges that Pixel Qi's technology faced was that it was promoted by the wrong messenger. Maybe you're right that there wouldn't have been a larger market for it, even if it had been rolled out with industry support as a commercial project instead of as part of an NGO. I don't know, though.
A screen that can be seen in the sun without a backlight draws less power, and most people use their mobile devices and laptops outside at least part of the time. Even with a full backlight, most screens today cannot be used in direct sunlight, and any outdoor use draws more power than indoor use, not less, which is the reverse of what it should be. I found the experience of using the OLPC screen perfect for what I wanted to do with it, and I think there would be a large enough niche to support reasonable unit economics if the product were marketed the right way to the right people.
Apologies for getting Jepsen's name wrong, by the way. Blame it on my typing out my first comment out on my phone.
A trainee acidentially broke the display but he was lucky: the customer wasn't interested in it anymore after seeing a demo. I don't know what became of the project.
> IMPORTANT NOTE: SunBook is no longer available because the Pixel Qi transflective LCDs are no longer made.