Russian startup to release a smartphone with e-ink display on the back [video] | Hacker News Reader

Russian startup to release a smartphone with e-ink display on the back [video]

news.bbc.co.uk

It seems bbc did not link the company's website: http://www.yotaphone.com/

I always wondered why a concept like this never made it to a device -- e-ink displays are pretty incredible with battery life, and my phones usually last quite a long time without the screen turned on. The specs look quite compatible to current-generation top end phones, so it'll be interesting to see this device in action.

I also recall Pixel QI (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel_Qi) working on a hybrid e-ink and lcd display, hybrid in the sense that they used current lcd manufacturing technology to have a display operate in two power modes, with and without the backlight on, with different resolutions too, but I haven't seen any of their displays make it to a really main-stream product yet.

"It seems bbc did not link the company's website"

The Beeb has to remain non-partisan commercially (in the UK at least) as they are tax payer funded - I guess inclusion of a link could constitute some form of advertising and might upset other companies.

A pure e-ink device might not appeal to users expecting a nokia/apple/samsung like screen response ("wot? No colours?") which I imagine would eliminate it from market. [I would love such a device]

"my phones usually last quite a long time without the screen turned on."

It's important to remember that this isn't just because the display is off - it's also because the device is in a low power state. Try having an app running with the screen turned off - it also doesn't last too long.

It's be interesting to see what % of the battery usage is due to JUST the screen. If anyone has any stats, please post!

In my experience its usually %50 screen %40 network radio and %10 everything else

Finally. I've been suggesting this for years. Companies who want to really compete with apple should be trying radical designs. Tragic lack of tinkering on the hardware front.

Indeed. Seeing this really makes me feel even less sympathy for Microsoft's failure to gain traction with windows phone. They're just not doing anything particularly exciting.

Companies who want to compete with Apple should try to understand what their customers would like better than the customers themselves. E.g. initial reaction to iPad and its success. Alas "radical design" usually ends up with UI astronautics and gimmicks which may be cool to show off once, but not really useable.

When phones started being sealed i.e. battery not removable I thought wouldn't it be interesting to have a phone with displays on the front and back.

Not eInk but full displays on each side, don't ask me why.

That would be a pretty cool way to play battleship :)

A dual-sided tablet even better.

I want to make a tablet belt holster too.

I agree with the tragic lack of tinkering, however, Samsung hasn't had to do anything radical on the design front to print crazy sums of profits successfully competing with Apple. They did of course have to produce great products.

Samsung produce great products and spend loads of money in advertising (Just like Apple). You can see the difference with HTC who also produce great phones, but lack on advertising spending. And they have suffered for it.

To say that Samsung "spends loads of money in advertising, just like Apple" is a bit stretching the truth, if Horace Dediu's estimations are to be believed:

http://www.asymco.com/2012/11/29/the-cost-of-selling-galaxie...

Samsung seems to spend about an order of magnitude (10x) more on advertising than Apple.

I would love all my displays to be e-ink, meaning: My 24inch displays for programming, my phones, everything. Android would need to provide an e-ink mode, but that shouldn't be too hard to do. I honestly don't need that much animation or color, so I would be more than fine with switching to it completely. I can still use my old display if I ever really want to do some multimedia use, but for day to day use e-ink should be perfect.

Have you ever tried scrolling with an e-ink display? Maybe the absolute latest ones are better but using the kindle web browser on my 2 year old kindle is an unpleasant experience.

Just use a pager. I prefer paging to scrolling.

What I'd like is probably something in between. Or one e-ink display and one 'normal'. But the OS would need to be aware that it was dealing with an e-ink display. You'd need to say goodbye to animations/flashing cursors and mouse pointers etc.

It's called Pixel-QI

Same here. If they could improve the responsiveness of e-ink displays I really love a large e-ink display.

The new gen ones are getting there. Triton eInk colour is capable of animation, though it's all dithered. Epson make some good fast chips to drive these displays. It's great that there's good progress being made with these. They're much better in sunlight than backlit LCD's IMHO. A pleasure to read.

The use cases / problems the device solves as mentioned by the CEO are multiple in nature. But I'm not sure which will realistically be the one that gets consumers to buy.

For me a phone with e-ink is amazing because it allows me to read stuff with hurting my eyes. You can also use it in the sunlight.

What does everyone else think?

I think it sounds like a great idea, and its awesome to see a small upstart challenging the big players with something really fresh.

I think it's a brilliant idea - as long as the screen is sufficiently protected. I am on my second Kindle. I'm not particularly rough on gadgets but I travel a lot and even the second one is starting to show a lot of wear whereas my iPhone shows almost none.

They say they've got some sort of curved gorilla glass protected thing going on, though I don't understand why they are going for a curved design over a flat piece.

Vlad touched on this briefly. It seems to be essentially an "affordance" to encourage the user to put the phone down with the e-ink side facing up. Putting it down on the side that makes it wobble feels less natural than putting it flat-side down.

Good point, I didn't seem to catch on it. It seems like an interesting design choice, I seem to always place my venerable droid-x with the screen facing down. Hopefully it is still quite easy to use the phone on a flat surface with the lcd screen facing up.

Seems inspired to Popslate, who's crowd-sourced fundraising is still going on on Indiegogo: http://www.indiegogo.com/popslate

It reached its target to bring an iPhone 5 case with eink on the back; it received pretty wide coverage (and raised eyebrows) back in late November.

In the interview the gentleman says that they have been working in it for two years, and they handle a working phone. I don't know what the lead time is to manufacture a new phone, but the timing indicates to me that they were conceived of independently.

That's the downside of crowdfunding. You have to release your idea into the wild and hope no one copies before you can get a saleable product out.

Maybe it would also be interesting to have phones with e-ink displays on its sides, for things such as notifications, weather conditions and phone status.

The form factor that makes the most sense for notifications is a watch. It's a lot easier to look at a watch than it is to dig out a cell phone.

A little watch that I could program with Lua to do pub/sub to my phone events would be great.

Not great conversation for a dinner party, but I'd buy one for $100.

I wonder what code would look like on an e-ink display. I would like to code outside in the sun.

You might want to check out the Kindle hacks that turn e-ink kindles into displays / terminals:

[1] http://www.turnkeylinux.org/blog/kindle-root

[2] http://tinyapps.org/docs/e-ink-monitor.html

[3] http://www.ponnuki.net/2012/09/kindleberry-pi

I'd be happy with something small (like the HTC Wildfire S) with just an e-ink screen. Or as the e-ink screen as primary with a tiny OLED for alerts.

What content would you like to see on your phone/tablet e-Ink backscreen?

The video shows a weather app as an example. It implies we would leave our phone the e-Ink screen up. I find it interesting because it changes the way we are using our devices today.

At the very least, you can now have a new rear cover wallpaper whenever you want. Other than that - I could definitely imagine games that involve switching between the two sides to solve puzzles. Flash card apps would be fun!

It may seem crazy, but I often read on my phone, I'd be way happier to have an eink screen there.

Not crazy at all; I used an ereader first but when I got my iPad I got fed up bringing the Kindle, iPad, phone (and laptop) with me all the time, so I started using the iPad to read. Then I got the S2 and decided it was big enough to read on with the kindle app and the iPad stays home as well... This phone would be great for that.

It can be used for saving battery also. Minimum functionality like calling, messaging can be provided on on e-ink screen and you can have battery life of around 30 days something.

Most of what I do on a phone could be done with e-ink.

Calling/skype, various messaging apps, podcasts, music, weather, bus app, email, calendar, chess clock. There are some things that wouldn't work (games, video). These are fairly low priority for me. Some things that might sorta work, especially if they were re-made for e-ink (eg maps/navigation apps). These I want on my phone.

An e-ink phone might not be a bad idea if it could carry other advantages too. A $200 smartphone with 3 day batteries that runs 80% of apps might be appealing to a lot of people.

A $50 smartphone with e-ink and 7 day batteries might take emerging markets by storm.

$50 sure. I don't think you could make a phone that could do what you need for that much though.

You do this by curtailing the capability, but leave enough that it's still tremendously useful. Eschew a backlight and do everything with the e-ink display. (They'll have to get more responsive for this to work.) Keep things on a low bandwidth basis, possibly even turning the radio off most of the time.

Something with just a little more capability than a "dumb" phone or feature-phone but with a more comfortable interface and 7 days battery life would be able to capture the market. Let's say, one builds "visual voicemail" and add some sort of more user-friendly banking front end which still uses the current SMS channels. Combine that with light web browsing and something like Wikipedia and Twitter/Facebook, and you'd have it.

Well there is a phone with e-ink and 7 day batteries. It's called Motofone F3.

It didn't had much success in Perú. (although I'm an avid fan an ex-user of it)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Fone

Good information, but this seems to be more of a feature phone with good battery life than a smartphone optimized for the particular use cases of the emerging markets.

Why do you think it hasn't cautious on in Peru. What would catch on there?

Well it was basically because it looked 'ugly' with fonts like an old calculator.

The phone had 3 mayor design issues. At least from my POV. First, I couldn't write . in in text messages. I had , @ even £ but alas, no .! Then there was the issue that all sound went increscendo, thing is the message notification was to short for the sound to reach an audible level. And last, as the e-ink only consumes power to paint the screen if you manage to run out of battery You wouldn't realize immediately as the screen was still showing what it showed before running out of power.

I think what would catch is something cheap that seems pretty/expensive.

My point exactly. An android handset optimized for time between charges would kill it. The other problems you mentioned are quite fixable.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5017643

Next event in huge font ?

Gotta love the possibility of getting a text that says "yup, its herpies get yourself checked" in lovely big-sized e-ink font, visible to everyone at the table.

I would love to have one of those! Right now, on the back of my phone, I have a camera and a quick stand; the rest is a waste of space.

I agree would love this

Have you seen the popSLATE ?

http://www.popslate.com/

Before I proclaim that I'd love this I only have one question. How much will it cost?

In the engadget video [1], they claim it will be priced as a top end android phone.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnO0p5XAl9Y

There are YouTube videos: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=yotaphone

Not excited by this.

I'm more excited because its different and bold. If this doesn't excite you at all, what are you waiting for?

eBooks are my thing. eInk stopped being exciting quite a while ago.

I like it, but I want the screens to be stacked. When you turn of the LCD screen I would like to then be able to view the e-ink display.

This is simply brilliant!I would be buying this for sure when it comes out.

The ad on the video is quite annoying!

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