Ask HN: Why E-Ink Phones?
I'm considering an E ink phone, like the Mudita Pure. Does any one have experience with an E ink mobile device? What are your thoughts? Pros? Cons?
My wife writes/reads books on eInk devices and I do reading, browsing and shell/coding. It works really well.
I can't imagine using a monochrome computer screen nowadays.
It doesn't matter for reading books, of course.
I was one of those people who could notice poor refresh rates in CRT (clicking teeth made it worse) and it drove me crazy.
This tech is not for me then.
You should try. E-Ink displays refresh their areas using algorithms involving "waveforms", normally at a layer which hides the details, but giving the vendor and user options about how the display will work. The amount of ghosting depends on the "waveform".
I have no issues with ghosting using an Onyx Boox Max2 as a tablet for word processing - which is quite an achievement.
Of course, colour-based syntax highlighting is unavailable, though a colour-eink device should be able to deliver a workable interpretation.
The "Normal Mode" is best suited to paginated books without any animation, and is virtually indistinguishable from printed paper (B&W/greyscale). Animation of any sort results in very annoying screen flash.
The "Speed Mode" effectively halftones images. I find that this often gives better results on photographs or shaded images, which otherwise appear slightly posterised in "Normal" mode. Most website animations are only grossly annoying (as per usual) rather than disrupting the display. (I really wish there were a toggle to disable animations entirely across web browsers.)
"A2" is mostly indistinguishable from "Speed" in my experience, though the refresh is slightly faster / ghosting slightly higher. Use when scrolling rapidly through materials. (Paginated navigation is much preferred for e-ink generally.)
"X Mode" is really only suitable for video. I actually watch many of those in "A-2", though in truth, this is more an "it's amazing it can be done" than "it works well". Yes, you can get a general impression of a video, but it's not a high-fidelity experience. That said, I don't watch much video in general.
There are some colour devices, though more usually ebook readers. Colour is muted -- more pastel than saturated, but gives some distinction for manga or color-differentiated graphics.
Video review of the Onyx BOOX Nova3 Colour: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=aSUcnkQCa-s
Plus, it has 3 screen refresh settings (low, med, high), and the middle one makes typing a very nice experience
IIRC, with the backlight on you got full color. With the backlight off you got greyscale.
I think my Surface Go first gen also has it, even when not advertised as such, because I can switch to white themes and almost work with back-light off in the direct sun.
What happens is that the light in front of the mirror overwhelms the light coming from behind it. I think you'd pretty much have this problem with any kind of transmissive display, whether it's internally illuminated or relies on transmitted light. Unless you can also shade the front of the display, you'll see little.
Early box cameras, the type that had a drape over the eyepiece or viewplate for the photographer to compose the image, also had this problem.
All of these rely on obscuring some portion of the transmitted light to create a visible pattern. That's always going to be muted by ambient light from the front of the display. It's why we watch films in darkened cinemas but read books (reflective medium) in brightly-lit libraries (or at least with a strong reading lamp nearby). Note that with any LCD-based display, the polarising layer itself blocks ~50% of the transmitted light.
This is why high-ambient-light displays strongly favour reflective media. Ink on paper, paint on canvas, billboards. E-ink happens to be a rapidly-updatable version of this, though not quite as rapid as the electronicly-modulated pixels of an emissive display.
What would be a game-changer would be a material (or suite of materials) which change colour under some rapidly-switchable field (probably electric or magnetic), preferably either on the RBG or CMYK colour space, probably from a white baseline. A response in the 16--120Hz range would be sufficient for video. These would produce the effect of a printed or painted display that could present high-response video and which you'd illuminate from the front rather than back.
Though I think I'm already shuddering to consider the possible applications....
Alec is describing the earlier version of the Onyx BOOX Lumi, I've got the next-generation version (Max Lumi), and there's since been an update to that.
Some of the issues (display mode toggling, manual display refresh) are addressed, some remain. The "Navigation Ball" seems to be a new feature of my device not present in Alec's walkthrough, and puts numerous controls closer-to-hand. In particular there's an ability to tune contrast and display modes for each individual application (for most, "Speed" or "A2" mode is preferable to "Normal"). I get used to switching these for specific tasks / reasons (that is, within the same app). It's a quirk of the device.
Otherwise, quite a useful walkthrough, and fair as to device features and faults.
I'm a horrible guide for that as I'm really not an artist.
The BOOX notes app (which doubles largely as a paint app) is pretty good, however.
The principle issues with third-party drawing and handwriting apps, from what I understand, are:
- Input lag for Android-native as opposed to BOOX/e-ink optimised is much greater.
- Android apps tend to presume colour and animation, both of which are poorly supported by e-ink. (Though there are in fact colour e-ink devics, including from BOOX.)
- Screen must be backlit. E-ink screens look great in perfect sunlight and fluorescent lights , but if you're used to a phone/tablet, you'd be surprised how dim e-ink can look just sitting on a couch in the evening, with a lamp a few meters away. Backlighting fixes that.
- Web browsing on e-ink is not bad at all if you stick to text-heavy stuff. The low refresh rate actually discourages "endless scroll" behaviour. Get a browser like Kiwi that allows you to set the Vol. keys as PgUp/PgDn. That makes the lag a lot less perceptible.
The battery life and visibility in the sun are both great features. I'm hoping the middle part of the spectrum between the eInk phones and the iPhone/Pixel starts to fill in. Something more along the lines of the Wise Phone (https://techless.com/).
I still would love an everyday phone that isn't an iPhone. Amazing rec for Wise Phone, has anyone tried it personally?
The way I describe it: persistence is free, pixels are cheap, paints are slow, colour is (mostly) nonexistent. I find the interface far less distracting than emissive displays.
My own leaning is toward the dumbest phone I can find (though an e-ink display would be excellent), an e-book tablet, and a good laptop. Tablets are excellent for reading in ways that neither a smaller phone nor landscape laptop are.
I use a normal Android phone and a phone sized Android e-reader. IMO, doing anything beyond reading long form material on an Android eink device is too painful to replace a phone because most apps have animations and lots of color.