My father does motorcycle touring and would love the same.
I have an old Sony Ericsson M600i symbian phone ( http://www.gsmarena.com/sony_ericsson_m600-1425.php ) I dig out for when I go travelling. The battery is still good for 10 days stand-by. It's such a pain to resync contacts, mail, etc... that all I really do is move the SIM over and use a travel email account.
If I could have the battery life of the old phone with the functionality of a new smart phone, then I'm very willing to sacrifice the screen quality to achieve it.
First-world problems :-)
Battery life is very important for a lot of people, especially when travelling. It would fantastic for reading on. It might be very light. Attractive travel phone.
If you think about it a minute, a lot of apps might be just as good with a simple, e-ink friendly UIs: exercise apps, audio players, chess, stop watch, contacts, weather, expensify, sms, skype, whatsapp, calendar, newspapers, bus schedule.
In fact, most apps either present information that you read (like magazines or calendars) or the important part is not in the UI (like music players). Some stuff would suck or break, like web browsers, maps and video (obviously) but not as much as my initial guess was.
The biggest problem I see is that to be e-ink friendly the phone would need to have the UI & apps modified specifically for it, so without a big market it won't work.
http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2011/05/i-wish-my-nooks-e-ink-disp...
E-Ink was done a great dis-service by the scanning-refresh chips that came out with the display. Simultaneous-refresh is how any reasonable display device does it.
So... the entire perception of e-ink as being slow/flaky is because of the controller chip used to drive it?!
That's ... man....
Are the faster electronics too power-hungry to use in a device like an e-book that's very focused on extremely long battery life?
But "nowhere near" doesn't have to mean inferior. For people who would rather read than play games or watch videos, this will be superior to an LCD phone as a time passing device. If you communicate mostly by email and text message, it will even be superior as a phone.
I don't claim to be representative of a large market, but this new device has finally done something that NFC, dual cores, retina, et al have failed to do, which is excite me.
Doesn't mean it can't be a great device for web surfing, listening to music and reading on, as well as a phone that lasts a week. If the colour aspect gets fixed I'd be tempted.
I don't want to watch videos but a terminal colour that refreshes as fast as I type would be fantastic. I plan on buying one of these at the earliest opportunity.
I would absolutely love such a device...
>It could be useful in India or African countries with not much access to energy.
It's appalling that countries located in regions where the sun tends to beat down most of the time lack energy at all.