Tag: E Ink

These days, there are digital signboard made from LCD monitors all over the place. So how do you stand out from the crowd? Perhaps with a slick ePaper display like this one which just broke cover at CES.

About a year and a half ago, we got our first glimpse at the Dasung E Ink computer monitor. It looked pretty cool and has some great features, but it was pricy. Also, it never came to market in a way that you could easily buy it.

We’ve seen many ideas for devices with flexible displays, but a company called Polyera claims that it will commercially launch such a device next year. It’s called the Wove Band, a smartwatch with an E-ink touchscreen running nearly the length of its entire strap. The Wove Band is based on Polyera Digital Fabric Technology, which “uses proprietary electronic materials to enable displays that are flexible, robust, and can be manufactured in traditional display fabrication plants with minimal capital investment.”

My wife and I have this ongoing feud over shoes. She has a plethora of footwear and tends to leave them right where I want to walk. Each time I trip on a pair, I threaten to make a bonfire out of them.

A couple of years ago we checked out the Popslate, an iPhone 5 case with an E-ink screen. Turns out it can only display images, which while still cool doesn’t make it that useful. The inkCase for the iPhone 6 on the other hand promises to display a variety of information on its E-ink screen. The inkCase has a 4.3″

The Vikaura is the polar opposite of the huge and expensive digital picture frames that have come up in the past couple of years. It’s simply a small E-ink display that receives messages or images from your mobile device via Bluetooth. You or your friends can send messages or images to Vikaura via its mobile app.

Last year we featured Maxim Mezentsev and Aleksander Suhih’s concept for a keyboard with E-ink screens on each key. The idea is for the each key to display a set of shortcuts, similar to Art Lebedev’s Optimus keyboards.

I went for years without wearing a wristwatch. I could just pull my smartphone out of my pocket and see what time it was. The larger my smartphones became, the more of a pain they were to pull out of my pocket, particularly when driving or sitting down, so I went back to a watch.

Unlike most artforms or professions, writing needs the most basic of tools. Even if you’d rather work with a word processor instead of pen and paper, you can just get a cheap laptop and be all set.

Two–screen phones? Pfff. Queen’s University professor Roel Vertegaal and student Antonio Gomes recently shared their prototype for a smartphone with three screens. They call it PaperFold, and its functionality changes with its form. For instance, the PaperFold can become a phaptop. PaperFold has three E-ink displays that can be used in a variety of ways.

Many programs provide an option to save or “print” documents as PDF files, but transferring or accessing the PDF on the go will require a couple of extra steps. You may have to sync your tablet with your computer or cloud service, mail the document or copy it on a flash drive.

Whenever you have a broken limb, life can get quite difficult. There aren’t plenty of ways that you can make it better, however, sticking a screen on it and completely modernizing is something I hadn’t thought about before now.

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.

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.

In the future, we may not have any problems with carrying even full-sized tablets in our pockets because they’ll be as portable as plain old paper, as shown in this prototype technology called PaperTab. It was developed by Intel, Plastic Logic and Queen’s University’s Human Media Lab.

One of the things you may not expect to see at CES is wristwatches. Despite that fact, it’s not uncommon for companies to show up with geeky timepieces claiming to be the “world’s first” or “world’s most” this or that.