Rumblings: Amazon to chum up with HTC, smartphones in mind HTC is having another tilt at hanging its fortunes on a big American brand, this time with Amazon. The mobe-maker's chief of marketing told the Financial Times “We have been very focused on building our own brand, but we have also been very open to co-branding and collaborating with carriers and other technology brands.” The …
> Is it really that hard to remember to plug it into a charger at night?
Of course, you're right. That's why nobody buys eInk eBook readers, isn't it?
Seriously though, some people do have/like to spend some/large parts of their life away from regular electricity supply. For them (ok, me) having a phone that didn't need charging every night (and incidentally would also be readable in full daylight) would be a Very Good Thing Indeed.
Daylight reading? That would be a novelty for a phone. Certainly high up on my list - more so than what the case is made out of and the asthetics of the modelling (how many get buried away in cases?).
I can't understand why more isn't spent on looking at this (sorry) when testing new phones. Nor the ability to be able to move Applications to a SD card/secondary memory.
Well, given that most humans spend 1/4 to 1/3 of their life sleeping, there's no reason our phones can't do the same.
I agree that daylight readability would be awesome in a phone, but e-ink is way too slow for a smartphone screen as others have pointed out. I'm sure there would be a market for that for people who use their phones as a phone only, but if you use it as a smartphone, e-ink would suck mightily for a screen.
Whoever invents a screen that combines the daylight readability of e-ink, the color accuracy of LCD and the power usage of OLED will deserve the vast fortune that results. And no one will care whether it can be made flexible or not!
Kindle's "paperwhite" display is an edge lit layer over sitting over the e-ink. It would have to turn off when not in use at which point it's just e-ink. The phone would have to play tricks the way the Pebble watch does nurse the battery life, only approximating time and so on.
Anyway Amazon does have another low power screen tech called Liquavista which is colour and passive. It still consumes energy but I guess it might allow a phone to last several days longer than devices which use OLED or LCD displays.
If Amazon can successfully shrink their skin down to a HTC One sized form factor, and come to the market at a similar cost to the Nexus 4, it will sell. The only reservation I have is the Amazon app store. They seem awfully slow to bring some pretty fundamental apps (Google Maps? Anybody?) to their users.
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