The Rise and Fall of Qualcomm Mirasol E-Readers (2018) | Hacker News Reader

The Rise and Fall of Qualcomm Mirasol E-Readers (2018)

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35 pointsecliptik11 comments

Rather unfortunate, I would love to have a colour always on E-reader smart watch with decent battery life but if the yield was 50% (as mentioned in the article), I can see why there was so little interest in the technology.

It's a shame the OLPC screen never went anywhere either: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OLPC_XO#Hardware, at the time it sounded like the perfect screen (high resolution, low-power, great readability and two modes) for consuming web content, academic papers and books.

> at the time it sounded like the perfect screen (high resolution, low-power, great readability and two modes)

My experience was that the OLPC looked awful trying to display color content -- the effective resolution was pretty low (~800x600), and everything had weird color fringing as a result of the bizarre "subpixel" layout.

It looked acceptable in greyscale mode, but, at the time I was using the OLPC (around 2008), software support for this mode was absent.

There are plenty of smartwatches with transflective displays today (e.g. most Garmins). Unlike normal LCD or LED displays they're perfectly readable in direct sunlight (with a reduced color gamut), they have great refresh rates, and basically become normal LCD displays when they have to. They do consume power more aggressively than e-paper/e-ink though: Garmin watches last a few days, while my Fossil hybrid smartwatch lasts a couple weeks.

I just wish they made laptops with them. I'd buy a laptop I can use at the beach with sunglasses in a heartbeat.

> I just wish they made laptops with them. I'd buy a laptop I can use at the beach with sunglasses in a heartbeat.

My Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo SI1520 laptop back in ~2006 had a transflective LCD, and that wasn't mentioned in the spec. I just bought it because it seemed like a nice laptop, and took a gamble on it running Linux well, which it did.

I found out some years after buying it, when I took it out in bright sunlight and found the screen was perfectly readable.

In bright sunlight each pixel looked like a square mirror or black, rather than the usual colour in darker environments. I don't know if it was officially transflective, or just a side effect of the LCD implementation, but that was the effect.

Text editing in Emacs in the Linux console while basking in open fields on a bright day was a breeze. I didn't try the beach but I think it would have worked perfectly.

As this wasn't an advertised feature, I thought that meant later devices would tend to have the same as standard, just something nice we could take for granted. Unfortunately that hasn't been the case on newer devices.

I'd probably buy another Fujitsu-Siemens laptop because I was very pleased with that one, but they shut down the business since then.

There is a newly released tablet with transreflective LCD and front light: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/world-s-first-color-rlcd-...

I got one on kickstarter a week ago, so I am still in the experimenting phase with it, but so far can confirm it works, with some quirks.

My Fenix 6x lasts 20 days on a charge, and far longer if I turn off the radios

Garmin is unfortunately in the middle of phasing out all their transreflective displays. The newest generation of their smartwatches (265/965/Epix) are all using OLED, save for the Fenix 7.

The newest Garmin Instinct has a transflective display iirc

I really like the concept of smartwatches like this, that's why I still wear a Pebble Time today.

I remember claims that the Mirasol display was capable of playing videos at 60 fps, which e-ink displays can't. Was disappointed that the tech development on this stalled.

Tech used to be so much cooler

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