> 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.