https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvO9ScTdwz8
It's the Hisense A9 with a beautiful and fast Carta 1200 e ink display. It's very capable, I would have preferred a phone more like that instead. It's biggest drawback is terrible USA cell reception. This company was initially going to make a phone like this but apparently keyboards were much more popular in polls.
Ideally I'd like something half way in between this and the Light Phone - small, stripped back phone that's less appealing to use (i.e e-ink with its grayscale and slow refresh rate introduce enough friction so it's not worth being on infinite scrolling apps), but still backed by an ecosystem like Android so that you can still access "essential" apps like Telegram/Whatsapp and Notion/PocketCasts and don't have to fully give up all the helpful progress we've made since 2005. I saw your other comment about the camera - it would also be nice to have high-end camera built in for taking photos and videos, even if I essentially can't look at them on the phone I'd still be happy to capture and sync them for use elsewhere. It's a fine balance. I'm hoping enough people start looking for this over the next few years to make the market worth targeting for manufacturers, but I'm not confident.
Good call, when I upload my camera test video I'll include a small section of viewing the photos taken as well on the eink screen. But for still photos it will look pretty similar to how b&w mode looks like on normal phones.
E-ink screen refreshes are just far too slow for something interactive. That’s one of the reasons they work great on e-readers.
I wondered if they were doing something special or had a different kind of e-ink screen that was faster in trade for some other property but at least the one in your video doesn’t.
When you’re trying to tap the screen a bunch to get something accomplished if each step takes 250+ms extra just waiting on the screen it would add up to frustration fast.
I do have other E-Ink devices (Boox, Nook) and I love them, so I'd love to get an E-Ink phone. But I don't want to carry a separate camera.
Source: Used to work in tech support there