A new color e-paper display could bring LCD-style quality but without the need for a power-hungry backlight, paving the way to new tablets, ereaders, and phones. Although color e-paper is already on the market in a handful of devices, the colors themselves tend to be far more muted than from an LCD or OLED panel.
Kobo has revealed its latest e-reader, though the Kobo Elipsa is just as much about taking notes as it is reading ebooks. Fronted with a 10.3-inch E Ink Carta 1200 e-paper display, the Elipsa is part-e-reader, part-tablet with a bundled stylus that can be used to annotate text, jot down ideas and sketches, and generally replace a paper notepad.
E Ink has revealed its latest color e-paper, with Kaleido Plus promising brighter hues and improved readability for future ereaders. The new panels - which can display 4,096 colors, but consume a fraction of the power of a traditional LCD or OLED screen - also support larger sizes than E Ink's current color e-paper product.
eBook readers like the Amazon Kindle, Kobo, and the Barnes & Noble Nook have been highly praised for their simplicity and benefits to the eyes because of their use of e-paper displays or EPDs. Those strengths, however, also come with their own weaknesses, like their inability to display color or do much else beyond reading ebooks. That's no longer true these days, though, with many eReaders adopting Android for more functionality. And then there's the new breed of EPDs that are showing off some colors, like the new PocketBook InkPad Color that is finally making its way to International markets.
The flexible display fever isn't stopping at smartphones, of course. Lenovo already made available its somewhat foldable ThinkPad X1 Fold but that's still squarely within the realm of typical computers. Such flexible LCD and OLED panels aren't the only game in town either and famed electronic paper giant E Ink is now trying to break new ground not just with colored ePaper or just flexible ePaper but a combination of the two that could finally turn wearables into technology you can literally wear, and not just on your wrist.
It may not be the grand in-person event it has been for decades, but for some companies, IFA week is still an opportune time to flood the world with tech-related news and product announcements. Case in point was the torrent of new Intel-powered computers announced yesterday, including a few flaunting the new Intel Evo mobile-friendly branding. Now TCL is making its own small flood with a bevy of new products, such as two new tablets, a smartwatch, and, curiously, a new kind of e-paper display.
If 5G was the common feature that most smartphone makers were touting last year, this year's theme seems to revolve around the screen once more. No, not some punch-hole cutout, in-display sensor, or even curved edges. Many if not all high-end phones boast of 90Hz refresh rates or even higher. In a sea of such advanced handsets, Hisense's next phone will stand out from the crowd with an almost opposite kind of innovation, bringing the world's first slow refresh rate smartphone with a colored electronic paper display.
There has been a small but prominent rise in interest in e-paper technologies like E-Ink due to their simplicity, energy-efficiency, and extensibility. Tablets and even phones using this kind of display are no longer unheard of, though rare, and that represents just one innovation in that field. Another, courtesy of a company named "Waveshare" is looking into how digital paper screens can operate without any batteries. All they will need is an NFC receiver.
E-paper tablet reMarkable has returned with a second-generation slate, with the reMarkable 2 an even slimmer, longer lasting paper notepad alternative. Unlike almost about all other tablets on the market today, reMarkable 2 doesn't use an LCD or OLED touchscreen. Instead, it relies on a low-power E Ink panel, much like a Kindle ereader.
We are too glued to our screens and yet almost all the solutions being offered mostly involve quitting cold turkey with a dumber than dumb phone. That may no longer be that practical in this day and age but that doesn't mean there isn't an answer. One answer could come in the form of phones using colored e-paper displays such as the one shown off by Hisense at CES 2020. This phone, which is a significant step up from regular E-Ink displays, could offer a perfect balance of utility and simplicity that could keep people off their phones.
Decades after they were introduced in the very first typewriters, keyboards remain one of the most critical input methods in modern life, even with touch devices. Despite its importance, very little has changed in the venerable keyboard and there is still no one keyboard to fit all. Enter Nemeio, a French company that’s making the still unnamed keyboard of the future. Rather than simply let you change keyboard mappings and try to remember them while looking at the same keys, this keyboard while change its display from keys to numbers to even icons.
Our smartphone screens are becoming larger and larger but they can only go so far without turning those phones into actual tablets. Some manufacturers are trying to solve that with still to come foldable phones though others take another approach by adding a second screen, usually on the back. Researchers at Microsoft apparently had a different approach to the problem. It did have a second screen, an e-paper one even, but instead of permanently fixing it behind the phone, they put it in a flip cover instead.