I wish TCL would stop referring to it as electronic paper, it’s a matte LCD with some desaturated modes for eye comfort.
for me, the major selling point of a true e-paper display is sunlight readability, if your “electronic paper” LCD cant match e-ink, then it’s not good enough.
The main E-ink patents are due to expire in 2026, so we should see some rapid development after that.
I recently bought a Boox Palma, which is a phone-size Android device with a real E-Ink display.
It’s not a phone (WiFi/Bluetooth only, no mobile radio), and with 4-bit greyscale it’s definitely an adjustment to use with a lot of apps (it has per-app DPI & contrast controls to help), but they’ve done a lot of work on the refresh rate to make it feel responsive.
It even has midrange-phone specs (SD 6xx series CPU, 6GB RAM, 4Ah battery), with full Google Play, so it’s a quite usable Android device overall. Like most modern E-Ink devices, has a CCT warm-to-cool frontlight, so great for night-time use.
Now would I want to use it as my only, everyday device (if it was a phone too)? Probably not. Could I? Almost certainly.
Colour E-Ink is still quite limited (in contrast, and resolution), but I expect the patents on that are quite a bit newer and we won’t be seeing so much movement in that area so soon.
I really wanted YotaPhone to succeed. Both a normal screen and a very very battery friendly e-ink for reading etc for hours…
I love my Boox Note 3. It’s am older device but still gets updates lots of tweaks for tuning the display on a per app basis, runs Google apps etc. I use it mainly as a reader for books and manga but also for drawing notes and browsing the Web.
Ooh, looks interesting. Though the size would be a disadvantage to me—I can imagine some situations where using an ereader is acceptable where a phone would not be, and other people won’t be able to tell them apart this way.
For me the main selling point of epaper is that the device can write to it then turn entirely off, for potentially multiple weeks of battery on a charge.
Nevermind that, an approach like what Sharp and the old PDAs did with transflective displays would be pretty neat too. But I suspect what’ll happen is that they’ll be called out for not providing “rich colours and deep blacks”.
Transflexive displays can work, but they arent as easy on the eyes as e-paper and they have poor contrast in direct sunlight.
OLED over transflective, do you get all the bright colors but it can go transparent and use the sunlight readable and low power screen when that makes sense
For me the biggest selling point of e-ink is for reading late at night. Since it’s not backlit it’s better for sleep, I think? Easier on the eyes, anyways.
What I dislike about phones these days is notches in the screen and my hands cramping up from the huge screen size combined with how slim the device is.
I just want to be able to hold my phone in one hand and control it that way like I could do with an iphone 4s, though would prefer an android phone.
You should check out the Sony lineup. They still do phones without notches and the size is pretty comfortable for one hand usage.
How’s the ROM support on them?
Pretty good actually, though about as much support for the smaller phones as they represent in market share.
https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/#sony
Though I’ve become a fan of DivestOS recently because they enable you to run Google Services (well, MicroG) as a user app, so it doesn’t have system permissions. Makes a good stepping stone to help my friends and family move away from Google.
Check out www.gsmarena.com and www.phonearena.com to find phones that meet your requirements. Their search tools are impressive. You can filter by all sorts of attributes.
SD cards and wired headphones too if that’s your thing
The problem with this is that everyone has different hands. Personally, large phones sit in my hand better. The phone I felt the most comfortable holding was a note 20 ultra. I have really long fingers though, so it isn’t for everyone, but I really don’t want to see all phones go back to being small. They do need some small varieties though.
The problem I have is not so much how well they sit in my hand, but if I can reach everything on screen with one hand without having to shift the phone around or resting it somewhere. I have huge, way above average pianist hands (they make Xbox controllers look small). I can’t do it higher than ~6.5 inches, and it’s way easier under 6.2.
I believe there is an app that helps with that. From what I remember you could do some gesture to get a cursor in the top part of the screen so you could press that.
Even then, the large phones are so flat thin, human fingers can’t bend at those angles easily. Thick cases generally help with that, but if the phone were a normal size, it would be easier to hold, could have a larger battery, and not need a case.
Also, since the manufacturers are all anti-bezel now, there’s no safe place to set one’s fingers without delicately holding the phone by both sides or side+back in some balancing act. Razr 5G 2020 was a neat combo, pretty thin borders, (but a notch), but the traditional old Razr bump at the bottom for nostalgia, which gave the phone a chin one could easily grab onto without fear of hitting touch buttons.
These companies quest for a thin sheet of touchscreen as the entire device and completely discard the fact that human hands have to interact with the device.
You are right. How could I forget about that.
I do wish I could have a phone that is comfortable but not unusable like those really tiny ones.
Take a look at the Asus zenfone 10, I’ve got me eye on that when this 6t finally gives up the first
All of that notwithstanding, I’d still prefer a matte display.
I wish there was a modern phone with an e-paper display on the back. E-paper is great for books and reading the newspaper.
Unfortunately, my eReader doesn’t really support modern web browsers, so it can’t do news articles…
Great, thanks!
