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Comment by netcan | Hacker News Reader

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.

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

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

$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.

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