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Comment by serf | Hacker News Reader

as poorly thought out as this looks, what I wouldn't give for a smart phone with a very low resolution e-ink swapped in screen plus the opportunity to replace all the camerawork,sensors, storage , etc with more battery. At least this may get someone thinking about the idea.

also the video and concepts kept making me think of how hot a big metallic "speed block" would be against my hand

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E-ink has too many problems, and it's not very good for anything other than mostly static content. If you're thinking "like Pebble" - Pebble doesn't use e-ink. It's using a type of LCD similar to PixelQi.

Mirasol on the other hand, has a ton of potential, and it seems to improve the overall battery life of a device by at least 3x (which means the display itself should be many times more efficient than LCD). Too bad nobody has picked up yet (other than Qualcomm themselves [1]) to use it into a line of products, so we can see improvements done faster to it (such as to color accuracy, gamut, contrast, animation speed, etc).

[1] http://www.androidpolice.com/2013/09/07/ifa-2013-hands-on-wi...

Despite the disadvantages, I would really like an e-ink phone (and netbook) for the significant increase in battery life it could give. The software could be designed so that it is usable on e-ink. No animations, no reliance on color for indicators, flipping instead of scrolling, etc. As you say, it would only really work for static content, but for me that is fine.

So basically a (non-Fire) Kindle in a smaller form and with more apps?

and it's a phone

Almost any phone not a smartphone could fit your description. There are so many phones that can last for almost a week, but all you can do is talk and text with some light apps.

Do you know of one with a QWERTY keyboard?

The Blackberry 8800 fits this description.

Yeah, I am looking for more of a smartphone. Apps, customizability, keyboard, wifi.

eink could be useful, perhaps more for a larger tablet "blocks" device. You could put in the eink screen when you wish to use it as an ereader, for optimal reading experience, and then replace it with a different screen for watching movies, etc.

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