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pnlrogue1 t1_j2ompxc wrote

I remember someone making a phone with an LCD on one side and e-ink on the other years ago. The idea was you could send content to the e-ink screen at will to save battery. Walking somewhere? Send a picture of the map. To do list? Send it over. Instructions to follow? On the back. Really wanted that to take off 😔

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Schedulator t1_j2ono9u wrote

Yotaphone 1,2 and 3. Mostly sold into China and Russia but has since gone bust. I had the Yota 2, a novel concept that I could get used to, but it didn't keep up with the development of other phones.

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detectiveDollar t1_j2sleqg wrote

That's pretty neat. Something else that would be cool would be having the eink panel sit on top of an LCD. Then just turn off the LCD and output to the eink. Afaik, eInk panels are transparent or can be made so when they have no ink on them.

I think some smart watches do this (use eInk for the always on time and OLED otherwise) and it's really neat.

Or maybe a dot matrix top display

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pnlrogue1 t1_j2xfryv wrote

The only problem with that idea is this one:

  1. Send something to the e-ink.
  2. Battery dies before you finish what you're doing and the phone shuts off.
  3. No battery/phone shutdown means the e-ink never appears and you lost the benefit of being able to save something for when the phone's dead.

Surmountable problem (and probably a rare issue anyway) but would be irritating if you were in that situation where you don't realise your battery is so low so your phone shuts down before turning on the e-ink!

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