cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/19284817
More and better e-ink, please. It’s just the best at the things it’s good at. Give me a foldable phone with one e-ink screen!
“E Ink” is a company, producing displays with a very specific proprietary technology. I think you mean to say more “e-paper”, which is a generic term for “paper-like” displays. And unfortunately, right now the only real competition is RLCD (reflective LCD), which is arguably not paper-like enough to qualify. Yes, it’s reflective, but other than that, it’s just a higher density Game Boy screen. Which is great and all, but it can’t compete with E Ink in a lot of aspects. It doesn’t have retention, you gotta power the screen, so no signage and stuff. It has LCD-grade bad viewing angles.
RLCDs are cool for certain uses though. For example, I sometimes choose to play on my AGS-001 over my Analogue Pocket if I’m outside in bright daylight.
I’d love a successor to Pebble which doesn’t require an account. There are a number of options, but my issue is that most require creating an account with vendor, and app integration with - no doubt - copiuos data harvesting and reselling. Many are absurdly expensive.
There are several cheap options on Alibaba.
Goodreader.com lists a number of expensive e-ink watches, some of which look quite nice.
But I’ve got my eye on Watchy (github, old review); it was introduced a couple of years ago and is still being updated. It’s also available from a couple of vendors, including preassembled through Amazon.
my eye on Watchy
Have one after the Pebble, let me know if you have questions.
Tried https://bangle.js? Loving mine so far. Edit: my bad https://banglejs.com/
I had an Amazfit BIP for a while that had a color e-paper display with a battery that lasted over 30 days. I think they have since gone OLED but one cool thing about it was, while they had their own app with a login, I could alternatively sync it directly with a third party app on Android that was called “Notify And Fitness”. I only mention it because within this particular app the info never left the device. Perhaps there is something similar today, but I have since just given in and gone Garmin.
Which one do you prefer?
And don’t say Pebble, that’s an e-paper (sharp memoryLCD), not an eink. I personally haven’t really encountered any actual eink watches that would seem any good.
I know E Ink is a company, but for most of us it’s become a de-facto term referring to the technology, like kleenex, or q-tips.
I have every Pebble model, and used them until the last one’s battery finally gave out. I’ve been using various e-ink (e-paper) readers, from the first Sony to my current Kobo & reMarkable (one for leisure reading, t’other for PDFs and writing). Are those displays different technologies than E Ink’s? Does the display process E Ink uses differ from other e-paper technologies? Are they not all based on polarized, bi-colored balls?
I have nothing against pedantry, but I also think E Ink has lost (or won, depending on how you look at it) the identity game; I suspect the majority of people - if surveyed - would neither realize E Ink is a specific company, nor that the correct generic term is “e-paper.” Everyone I know (with whom the topic comes up) just call it “e-ink,” whether or not it comes from that company. Similarly, I’ve never heard anyone call it “e-paper” IRL.
P.S. I just did a search for “e-paper watches”, and most results call them “e-ink.” Maybe they all use E Ink-brand displays, but I can’t really tell since none seem to capitalize or ™ the term. There’s a bunch of cheap watches on Alibaba which are called “e-ink” watches - are those all really using E Ink brand displays?
The Fossil hybrid watches are pretty awesome. Very sad they are now discontinued.
No idea if it’s any good, but here’s an e-ink watch: https://www.crowdsupply.com/sqfmi/watchy
Seen a noname Aliexpress phone with a normal display on one side and an e-ink one on the other.
Now make that an option on a flagship device (preferably a non-chinese manufacturer) and I would definitely look into it.
If I remember correctly there was also a flagship producer that produced such a phone as a sort of prototype some time ago, no?
Would that be because of creasing issues, or are there other practical differences?
and generally aren’t very useful for high-motion graphics like videos or games.
I do like the fact that my e-reader is just for reading books without distractions. Thats also kinda the point of e-ink, to be as close to paper as possible and make digital reading better. I don’t see the need yet for a paper like screen to animate video because it won’t be as good as a normal screen. I’ll prefer specialized screens over a catch-all type any day.
I mostly agree, but it would be nice if it was a bit faster to be able to use it for web browsing. I still like reading long form articles and such but navigating and scrolling isn’t very viable yet on e-readers.
EinkBro lets you treat sites (or the reader mode) like pages and turn them accordingly. My boox go color 7 also has page turn buttons, and allows you to configure them to scroll x distance on a per app basis, which works like a page turn on apps that only allow scrolling. It makes reading articles with omnivore work pretty well. Example And switching to speed mode
I’m not sure if you can easily make the same tweaks on the other Boox devices or using volume buttons on other Android devices or whatever, but there are ways around it.
I definitely do agree with you that the capability of faster refresh would be nice to have, but right now isn’t bad.
This article has completely missed a selling point of e-readers for people like myself: no constant refreshing.
My eye strain, when reading for a long time, doesn’t come from the light (or lack thereof), which is evident as a positive of backlit Kindles and other e-readers, though the constant flicker of screens. E-ink solves this issue perfectly, and with every device in that article mentioning “60Hz” on their alternatives I feel as though they’ve missed a big point of having an e-reader and what exactly constitutes as “paper like” (it’s a lot more than just “low/no backlight”).
Are you talking about pwm? Most screens don’t refresh if nothing is changing
This isn’t technically correct. CRT, LCD, and OLED displays are generally constantly refreshing the image. There are some niche exceptions like memory-in-pixel displays but they are few and far between. eInk displays are very different in this aspect because the display itself acts as a physical memory of the image because its mechanism of creating an image involves physical changes (pigmented particles moving closer or further away from the visible plane).
I just wanted to add this video to your comment because e-ink is so cool and this guy has a bunch of macro shots of the displays that are awesome and you can see the particles in the screen changing colors.
So cool!
It would be neat to compare these new reflective LCDs with the 25-year-old ones used in the Game Boy Color.
Reflective LCD, like my palm pilot used? I didn’t think we would see those make a comeback.
