They've made several e-ink phones by now.

It's just not suited for it. Even though it CAN do fairly smooth animation, it always looks like absolute ass due to the ghosting.

The tech is doing fine tho. There are two decent ways to do color now (one fast, one slow), and the picture quality is mind-boggling when you let it refresh properly. It's absolutely fantastic for reading books, but it's only gotten better for my favorite use-case, which is comics and manga. The ability to do color adds so much.

It's also in use in a ton of industries. There are re-usable eink price-tags for store shelves that you can put price and product info on. While just sitting there showing info, they use no power, while still being able to be updated digitally when needed.

I also realized the live timetable at my local bus-stop is actually a giant eink panel. Which makes so much sense. Compared to a giant LCD panel it uses orders of magnitude less power, and is even more readable in daylight without any kind of backlight, and it only needs to update once a minute. It doesn't show any info with more than 60 second precision anyway.

But eink simply cannot compete with LCD/OLED in terms of emissive color quality and refresh rate. While it straight up wins in terms of daylight readability, longevity and power efficiency. Supposedly the panels lose contrast over time, but I've never noticed it happening myself, even on decades old devices.

For normal use tho, eink sucks. I avoid ever using my ereader for anything except actually reading. Writing, doing any kind of browsing, (even to find something to read), is horrible. It's like using a phone with gloves on, but all the time.

The experience is at its best when you just continue reading something you already had open, and only ever interact with the display or a button to turn the page. The moment you need to pan, zoom, select something, use and on-screen keyboard, etc. you start wishing you could use something else.

I literally use my phone to find what to read, then switch to the ereader to actually read.

Thanks, will try this out later

There is this paragraph:

Bigme promises that the 3,300-mAh battery will "maintain a charge for a remarkably long time" – though doesn't actually specify how long that might be. You'll need to plug in more often if you make use of the 36-level front light when strong ambient light isn't available.

Vague, but that's not the author's fault. Aside from GPS, games are the other thing that uses loads of battery and you won't be playing many graphically demanding games on that display - but we want numbers!

Brother, did you read the article?

3,300-mAh battery will "maintain a charge for a remarkably long time" – though doesn't actually specify how long that might be.

If it's the same as past e-ink phones it'll be slow. But nothing you're going to do on an e-ink phone is super likely to require that much power anyways unless you are using your phone far differently than I am.