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Comment by oftenwrong | Hacker News Reader

I would be all over an eInk smartphone. I would gladly accept all of the disadvantages of eInk for that battery life.

Someone was showing off this really incredible concept phone where the screen was BOTH eInk AND a regular LCD screen in one. Basically the eink display would constantly show your notifications, and you could turn it on (LCD) to get full apps, web-browsing, etc.

Unfortunately it was a concept by a really small company, so I don't know if we'll ever see it come to market.

http://www.yotaphone.com/#/en/

Motorola had an eink dumb phone in 2006. (http://betanews.com/2006/11/28/motorola-unveils-9mm-entry-le...)

Samsung had, er, this thing in 2009. (http://gizmodo.com/5251232/samsung-alias-2-e+ink-flip-phone-...)

People complain about input lag - see some of the comments about the Mozilla firefox phone. I guess they'd hate the refresh rate of the eink.

And isn't a lot of the power going to WIFI or 3G, rather than the screen? How much advantage is there?

Just from personal experience, Android always reports my display as consuming the majority (around 60%-70% usually) of my battery, anytime I've cared to check. That's for general usage as a phone/music player.

Hmm. My screen's been on for 2h 22m out of 2d 10h 22m (about 4%) and it's used 3% of the consumed battery. 49% of the consumption is cell standby, 47% is phone idle.

YMMV of course, but 70% screen consumption seems way high to me.

I guess I don't check except when I'm low, and if I'm low, it's due to using it and having the screen on. If I leave my phone "off" (that is, I don't actively use it, but the radio is on), then the display is less (for a N1 I have on me, it says screen is 20% this morning, and it's done nothing but sit there for a day).

In other news, the light bulb in my refrigerator is always on, anytime I've cared to check.

In other words: chances are that you only check power use when your display is on. If the display is off 80% of the time and all other components stay on full time, that would sink the power use of the display to around 25%-30%.

The usage report is cumulative, not instantaneous. The act of checking probably isn't a significant fraction of their phone usage.

So if for a given usage pattern the screen does consume 60+% (which is what I often see) then keeping it off all the time certainly helps ... but also makes the phone a lot less useful!

Those other components don't take much power. My phone lasts a week idle, and the hours it lasts with the screen on would go up tremendously with e-ink, especially outdoors. The backlight takes an overwhelming majority of power for such activities.

Your comparison is flawed. The Android power meter shows the power consumption that has happened over a period of time, not just what is consuming the power the most right when you look at it.

If I disable WiFi, then check the power consumption, WiFi still appears to be consuming approximately 4% of the batter compared to 42% by the screen, which is the top listed item, and dwarfs the number 2 item, Android OS at 9%.

If I run without WiFi for a period of 24 hours or so, then presumably the WiFi battery consumption would drop to 0%, or at least begin approaching 0%, but either way, this is a far different test than just seeing if the refrigerator light is on.

The big problem with that Moto phone was that it was using a segmented e-ink display, like a e-ink calculator screen. So it could display phone numbers well, contacts poorly, and texting was a joke.

Onyx are "apparently" releasing one shortly (this quarter).

https://onyx-boox.com/coming-soon-e-ink-news/e-ink-smartphon...

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2420952,00.asp

EDIT: updated link

I wish this was still on the market: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peek_%28mobile_Internet_device...

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