Hasta La Gadget!

Last year we heard about the YotaPhone, a smartphone that has two screens – the usual full color touchscreen and an E-ink screen. A small company has come up with a case for the iPhone 5 that gives Apple’s smartphone a similar set up to the YotaPhone. Called the Popslate, the case has an E-ink display at the back.

The Popslate’s screen draws power from the iPhone 5′s battery via the Lightning connector, but because it’s an E-ink screen it shouldn’t make a large dent in the phone’s battery. As for its usefulness, many of the same things that can be said about the YotaPhone apply to the Popslate as well. You can leave a map or recipe on there, read books and do other things that require an always-on screen. The makers of Popslate also said that they’ll develop an open API so other people can make apps that work with the case.

It all sounds good, but even though the $119(USD) device was successfully crowdfunded on Indiegogo and is now available for pre-order, I don’t think you should reserve one just yet. The demo above is clearly a mock-up – as Vimeo users pointed out, E-ink screens don’t refresh as smoothly as the one shown in the video. I’d suggest that you wait for a review or at least a demo of the finished product before you even consider getting one.

[via Outgrow.me]

If you are out in the market looking for a high end flagship smartphone for your mobile communication needs (and some gaming on the side too, of course), then you would do well to give this story a miss. After all, who would want an Android 2.3 Gingerbread device in this day and age? The handset in question that we are talking about here is the E Ink Android phone, where it is said to retail for approximately $200 after conversion and is currently on display at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain.

The E Ink Android phone is not ready to fly off retail shelves just yet, as it remains a proof-of-concept device, which is why there is Android 2.3 Gingerbread as the operating system of choice. Since it carries an E Ink display, you can forget about all the bells and whistles of a Full HD smartphone, but one main advantage it has would be a week of battery life. Yes sir, it also looks great in the outdoors under direct sunlight instead of washed out colors, and since there are less bits and pieces underneath the hood, the entire device is extremely lightweight.

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Corning Willow Glass At Least 3 Years Away From Appearing In Consumer Products, Fujitsu Prototypes Tablet That Watches You Type A Nonexistent Keyboard,

It takes a lot to stand out at a trade show the size of Mobile World Congress. But here’s one device that caught my eye today: an e-ink smartphone. Unlike Yota Phone, the Russian startup that’s using e-ink as a second screen to augment the back of a powerful high end smartphone in a bid to stand out in the uber crowded Android space, this prototype device has just the one screen. A single e-ink screen on the front of the device — so it’s a true e-ink phone.

It’s also a true smartphone. There were two prototypes on show at Eink‘s stand, both with a 1GHz chip inside and one (the white one) with a 3G chip in it. The other had Edge connectivity. The phones run Android but, as you’d expect, the OS has been simplified with a custom UI that strips back the functionality to focus on the applications that make sense for a fully e-ink smartphone — such as a reader app, a dialer and email. The UI also includes a web browser since certain types of webpages can be viewed on an e-ink screen. It won’t support video of course but text-based sites can still be read.

The black prototype device (pictured below) also includes a backlight for reading in the dark. Both screens are capacitive, but as you’d expect with e-ink the refresh rate can be a little slow. Ghosting on the screen from past renders can be removed by shaking the device. The technology can support both portrait and landscape orientation so the e-ink smartphone could be turned on its side to switch the orientation to more of an e-reader sized width. Both devices felt incredibly lightweight.

Why do you want an only e-ink phone? Price for one thing. Battery life for another. Not to mention visibility in bright sunlight. Put all those factors together and this could be the perfect device for some emerging markets where electricity is at a premium. The prototypes are proof of concept at this point but Giovanni Mancini, director of product management for E-ink — the company which makes the screen — said the Chinese OEM which has made the prototypes, Fndroid, is talking to telcos and could launch a device this year.

So how much would this e-ink smartphone cost? Mancini said the device maker would set the price but in his view it would be comparable with a feature phone price tag. A big theme of this year’s MWC has been smaller mobile players — from open source OSes like Firefox that are seeking to drive openness and accessibility and drive down the cost of devices, to mobile veterans like Nokia focusing afresh on building smarter feature phones to target cost-conscious users in emerging markets. So it’s interesting to see companies toying with the idea of an entirely e-ink smartphone to cut device costs while preserving key smartphone functions such as access to the internet and email.

Click to view slideshow.

The Optimus Maximus keyboard from Art Lebedev was cool, but it was way too expensive for most people, especially since keyboards are used so often and can break over time. I can only imagine what repetitive typing would do to all of those expensive little OLED displays. The E-inkey concept keyboard uses more cost-effective E-ink displays instead.

This changeable electrostatic keyboard is the brainchild of designers Maxim Mezentsev and Aleksander Suhih. The keycaps could contextually adapt their display depending on what you are doing, and which application you are using. The tiny energy efficient displays on the keycaps could possibly be made without ending up with a keyboard that costs as much as a computer.

Admittedly, if you’re a touch typist, the added displays wouldn’t be that useful, but it would look plenty good. Again, like many cool things, the E-inkey keyboard is still just a concept. Hopefully, somebody will put it into production in the not-too-distant future.

[via Yanko Design]

Keyboards are more or less the same and it’s quite hard to “improve” on it, apart from ergonomics which some might disregard over features like macro buttons, mechanical keys and etc., which basically means that it really boils down to the preference of the user. However wouldn’t it be somewhat of a novel idea of the keys on our keyboards were actually dynamic in the sense that they could change depending on what we are typing or what kind of software we are running? If you said yes to that, then this concept keyboard with e-ink keycaps might be worth taking a look at, and could leave you actually wanting the product to be made.

This concept was cooked up by designers Maxim Mezentsev and Aleksander Suhih who envisioned a keyboard featuring e-ink keycaps that would change depending on the situation at hand. For example if you were surfing on a foreign website like a Japanese or Korean website, maybe the keys could change to Japanese or Korean characters, and switch back again to English later. Or maybe it can even be mapped out to show Photoshop keyboard shortcuts or display symbols that one might not typically find of normal keyboards. It’s a pretty novel idea but it has some potential – what say you?

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Smartphone Dock Bowl Helps You Slurp Ramen While Keeping Your Eyes On Your Phone, iFlex flexPhone Concept Has Flexible Display,