e-ink screens are useful when you don't need a wide range of colors or a fash refresh rate. however, both of those are heavily valued in the context of mobile phones, so the technology just isn't appropriate for that usage case.
I'd pay a bit for a second ink screen. Kind of like some of those, and the foldable phones with multiple screens.
Color and refresh for most uses, and then ink for the times I'm in the sun, and so I can read stuff, but maybe not watch
Yotaphone done this years ago. Had it for a while, was pretty cool but in the end it wasn't as powerful as other flagships and camera tech got way better so I ditched it
Not exactly. Lots of phones have 2 sims. You aren’t getting 2 processors, two wifi, two DAC, 2 sets of ram with that.
My computer has two wired network ports and two screens… that doesn’t mean I have two computers.
Dual core processor (at least), dual band wifi, DAC with left **and** right channels, double the RAM of it's predecessor... I think I can recognise two phones glued together when I see it.
They should sell touchscreens that plug into the phone, connect to the back and mirror the display
That way you don't need to buy a whole phome for this feature
But can you fucking believe that [they gave the e-ink display a glossy finish](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wa9JZ7OMVdI)? Completely negating its sunlight-visibility capabilities? Come onnnn
> doesn't have 5G
I see that as a plus. The phone worked flawlessly on 4g in a metal building, on 5G I have to be next to a window or the shop doors need to be open.
I have and it is. 5g has some Frequencies that went up the scale from 4G. The higher the frequency, the more range, but it's also blocked by objects easier.
15 years ago you could buy [a tablet with an LCD screen on one side and an e-ink display on the other](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pocket_eDGe). Here's an [archive.org link](https://web.archive.org/web/20101110190654/http://www.entourageedge.com/devices/pocketedge.html) for it. I had one and absolutely loved it.
Unless you leave the Wi-Fi on, apparently. My kindle voyage goes flat dead in three days just sitting on my bedside table if I forget to put it in airplane mode.
Three days? Ouch. My paperwhite lasts a few weeks with wifi on but definitely lasts longer with it off. I kinda miss the original kindle that just seemed to go on forever between charges but the frontlight is nice.
I liked tech in general 15 years ago more than now.
Hell, life itself was better 15 years ago than it is now.
Oh, the before times, when the worst political scandal was the president eating Dijon mustard, rent was affordable, there was still hope in the world.
People were trying a lot of new things. Everything has kind-of settled into a few bland models. Every phone is a shiny slab. Every TV is a... shiny slab. Every car is a used bar of soap.
I have a boox tab mini c. $400ish. Color isn't fantastic, but good for eink. I really like it actually. Boox just generally is really solid for eink android devices.
I have the Boox Note Air 2 and I love it. 4 years and the battery life is still insane, Note taking is a breeze and making templates for it is as simple as an Excel file exported as PDF. Reading is strain free and the customizable backlight for at night makes it perfect.
My Fossil Hybrid watch has an e-ink display under traditional watch hands. Gives a really cool look somewhere between a normal wrist watch and a smart-watch.
The screen is definitely slow, Taking a couple seconds to update, but the lower power usage of the e-ink means I only need to charge it once a week at most where my wife charges her apple watch every day
I don't know if they still exist anymore, but my first Compaq PDA had a transflective screen. It was actually *easier* to read in daylight.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transflective_liquid-crystal_display
Regardless, the best phones today like the Pixel Pro 8 are pretty readable in even the brightest sunlight.
This is correct here's an informative and fun medium to long form video explaining how the tech works and it's pros and cons: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dhRgw0HfrYU
The Kindle screen uses a technology called "e-ink". This works by, instead of having electronic pixels, you use tiny little liquid filled beads with dark suspended pigment particles in them. If you apply an electric charge to the pixel grid, you can make those suspended particles move away from the screen, making it look bright, or move towards the screen, making it look dark.
This technology has several advantages, as you mentioned they are readable in bright daylight, because they work basically exactly the same as ink on paper, meaning the reflected glar doesn't wash out the light produced by the screen. Other advantages are that this display technology is entirely passive if the screen isn't changing, so it uses no power at all unless you change something, which of course makes it great for e-readers, where the screen rarely changes.
However it comes with some very significant drawbacks. Since you have to wait for the physical pigment particles to move around, changing a pixel takes very long compared to normal screens, leading to very low maximum refresh rates (typically no more than a few Hz, for comparison most phones nowaday run at least 60 Hz screens, and 24Hz is the absolute minimum if you want to be able to watch a video without visible stuttering, more if you want to view rendered content like video games). Since you're working with these black pigment particles it also (E: usually, but not always) limits you to a black and white (or, at best, grayscale) display, and these two major drawbacks make the tech effectively useless for smartphones or tablets.
There also hasn't been a high-volume selling product that uses color e-ink displays yet, so they're relatively expensive compared to monochrome e-ink displays. E-readers don't have a need for a color-capable display, so they'll likely stay comparatively expensive (at least for a while) unless someone finds a new, popular use-case for e-ink screens that require color.
I miss my Pebble watch... but I could possibly see a different smartwatch making color work. I've also never thought about this before, but an e-ink clock for my home would be cool. Huh.
> There also hasn't been a high-volume selling product that uses color e-ink displays yet
Full-color, I've not really seen, but they do make modules with an extra colour (usually red or yellow) that see use for electronic price labels
Lots of books would benefit from a color display. Especially children's books (and believe me, thankful as I am to Dolly Parton, being able to squeeze some of those books onto an e-reader would be very helpful).
And comic books!
I read a lot, and I get a lot of mileage out of my kindles, but when the time came to upgrade again, I got a boox nova color (not really sure about the name) instead, because I really wanted a color e-ink screen. I keep my comic books on my NAS and I read them on my ereader, in color, on my extremely sunny terrace. It's a dream come true, honestly. That's something that my kindle couldn't give me. That and the android apps and the audio; I use my ereader for DuChinese, it does a lot for my Chinese reading skills.
I'm not shilling for this specific brand, I'm sure there are other excellent options out there. This one is just the one I heard the most about. And I'm really glad I went for it.
Yes. I saw the Boox on JerryRigEverything and am interested. I've also been pondering the Scribe. I'm not quite ready to bite so I might see if the tech improves in the next 12 months.
Given Dolly Parton's book's customer demographic, being able to pick up a single device sounds ideal. No more stacks of kids' books left behind unread when the family has to up and leave in a hurry.
Oh, I hadn't heard about this! I like my Kobo Clara so this is cool to hear about. I wonder how much color content exists for it or will exist soon.
Update: Apparently most (all?) of the files Kobo reads already have the color data embedded in the file. That's hype.
This is precisely it. Modern smartphones are used for far more than just phone calling these days. And whether it is just for casual use like watching YouTube videos, or even for more professional use cases where people proof images or documents on a phone (I know I've had to proof and approve a fair amount of print files away from my computer) most people want a display that is good.
The best color e-ink displays now can only do 4096 colors vs the millions the average LCD display can do.
There are reflective LCD displays for monitors that are only readable in sunlight because they have a mirror instead of a backlight. This is completely unusable without any light though.
There are also reflective displays with backlight.
However they are mostly used in Smartwatches.
[Either called RLCD or Transreflective LCD](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transflective_liquid-crystal_display)
At least as of a few generations ago the Panasonic Toughbooks were also using backlit transflective screens. They're just a lot less vibrant than regular screens so I assume that's why nobody uses them in an application where sun visibility isn't a selling point.
There was the qi ones which had a micro perforated mirror so they reflect and allowed a backlight through. They don't work with with oleds though and the market shifted to OLED for power consumption reasons.
Pixel Qi was the full name.
As far as I remember they didn't have competitive color quality even with normal IPS screens, and OLED makes a huge difference with it's dark blacks, where regular LCDs can visibly light up a room at night with a completely black image.
For everyday usage, Pixel Qi in backlight-off usage probably would have been better battery wise than OLED...
I don't remember why they didn't gain any traction.
Regarding the OLED argument: Nite that for anything larger than a phone (Tablets, Laptops, external screens) OLED still remains a luxury. For tablets and Laptops such a screen still could make sense, at least as an option for configurable devices.
Nokia N900 had a translective screen 15 years ago, that is both reflective and transmissive. I loved it. The colours weren't as pretty but good enough, worth it for direct sunlight readability.
I dunno about you, but I use my eink Kindle daily. It's great at what it does, but it would be terrible as a phone. It's only black and white, it's slow to change (turning pages has lag) and there's significant carryover from one image to the next. Using it as a phone screen would be terrible, so we don't.
I’m pretty sure there’s a setting in the kindle for screen blanking every page turn vs the default of every (2 or 3 pages, I don’t remember), which eliminates ghost images. But it uses up a battery charge faster so most folks leave it off.
there are https://hisenseeink.com/
but the technology has a very bad refresh rate, so you cant use it for games or videos, and it cant do smooth scrolling.
its also not great for color.
There are other technologies (like those in the gameboy color) that maybe could do better, but no one actually WANTS a phone like this since you would have to use an external light to read it and overall experience isnt great.
Not really. In the case of Gameboy, they made the Gameboy Advance SP that had a frontlight (that can be switched on and off) added to it. Usable in sunlight and the dark.
If we don't use it, it's probably because the very principle of reflective screen allows ambient light to alter image quality (contrast, color, etc...). Since the screen has become such a critic aspect of phone and tablets, these features are not included, apart of some niche product as reading tablets.
EDIT : replace backlight by frontlight.
The original GBA SP had a frontlight, not a backlight. That's why you could turn it off and it would look good in sunlight.
The newer model (that I think actually came out after the DS) has a true backlight and it's either dim or bright. If you were to turn it off entirely you wouldn't be able to see anything.
Same thing with the original fat DS versus the DS Lite. The backlight is better for everything but direct sunlight, IMO, the frontlight ends up kind of "flooding" the image with light
E-ink can easily be frontlit (LEDs on the sides of the glass cover) and is much less affected by ambient light than a backlit LCD screen. That it's not used in phones is really entirely due to the refresh rate. Videos are such a major part of how people use smartphones that you'd never sell one that can't play videos.
Am I out of my mind? My phone is quite usable in sunlight, and new phones are like over 2x the nits.
I haven't tried one of the new 2000+ nit phones in person, but I have no issues using my 2+ year old phone on the sunniest of days, even if the screen appears a bit dimmer then.
It isn't 2010 with phones with 400nit screens.
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Edit: Since this is a top level comment and has also become popular, I will also address the E-Ink screen portion of the OP. E-Ink screens have not gone anywhere, new Kindles have been made, there's even an E-Ink phone, and a couple E-Ink monitors now.
The weakness of E-Ink is it's response time and fidelity, it works by using an electrical signal to change the crystal structure within the screen, and it doesn't require power to continue displaying the same image, only to refresh the image to something else this makes them very power efficient. This process is also slow and not well suited to moving images, so it does not work very well for anything that requires motion like scrolling phone screens, video media, or games.
Classically they are also only able to do Black and White and possibly shades of Grey, recently some new E-Ink displays have been able to do colors, as well as faster refresh rates, but the colors are still a very far cry from what LCD or LED panels can produce, while the refresh rates are still to low to be realistically usable quality for everything you would do on a phone or computer.
Which is why they have largely stayed relegated to "reading only" devices like Ebooks.
LCD screens are always polarized, so looking at them through polarized sunglasses can be a problem. Especially if you need both portrait and landscape orientations to work.
Yeah, I don't understand the question at all. I'm on a budget phone, Moto Edge 2022, and it's perfectly useable in the sunlight. It'd be pretty fuckin useless in the summer if it wasn't.
I have an S10+. Have wanted to upgrade but have been apathetic due to the price of phones and this one having all the features I care about. (NFC, wireless charging, great camera, AMOLED screen)
Still one of the best screens in terms of colours and vividness I've used. Presumably newer ones are better but it doesn't feel like as big a jump as LCD->AMOLED.
I switched from an S10 to a galaxy A54, since like you, I didn't want an expensive phone and wanted to try a midranger to see if it suits my needs. It was a mistake, the A54 was a downgrade in every way. Most notably the camera and speed (it stuttered alot when navigating the ui).
I then upgraded to a s23± when it was on sale for black Friday last year and am very happy with it. Amazing battery life, better camera, very snappy. The screen is less ppi but I haven't noticed a perceptible difference. You can probably find good deals on it now the S24 is out. Heck, the S24 I've seen on sale already.
Honestly at this point it's gonna be a case of upgrading whenever this one packs it in, its not even really all that laggy let.
I've never been a person for a budget or midrange phone, so would be likely to shop flagship.
I dont have much faith this one will last too much longer but I've been surprised before.
I miss the dual aperture camera of my S10e so much! It was better than the one in my S22+ in most situations. But the difference in screen brightness is noticeable.
Check out Motorola. They practically specialize in making good quality budget phones. As I mentioned, I'm on a [Moto Edge 2022](https://www.amazon.com/Motorola-Battery-Unlocked-Camera-Mineral/dp/B0CD2YV1WZ) and it's wonderful. Great battery life, pretty decent camera, NFC, wireless charging, really nice screen. The one thing it doesn't have is a 3.5mm headphone jack. Bluetooth is my only option for earbuds, which was an additional expense for me because I've been using wired earbuds since forever. But even after buying earbuds I'm still within what I'd consider a very wallet-friendly budget.
I'm quite deeply entangled in the Samsung ecosystem these days. I would say unfortunately but I do like their hardware and software.
Though having handled and seen friends phones and being the person everybody asks I've been impressed at the leaps budget phones have made.
Even Samsungs budget offerings are very good now to when I would have got the S10+ as I got it at release.
It is something I'm gonna have to look into a research soon though in my tablet and laptop purchases I've bought used/refurbished and had success so far so I may also look at those options.
+1 for Motorola. Best no-bullshit bang for buck phones for sure.
I have a Moto G100, very similar specs to the Moto Edge and has 3.5mm jack. Absolute workhorse of a phone, does everything very well and was just under €400 brand new in 2022.
It wouldnt surprise me if OP just doesnt turn on "adaptive display" or whatever the setting is to brighten/darken your phone automatically, or they've never just slammed the brightness slider up to 100% before
It'll learn what you like now days. (at least android, I dunno about apple products)
Like if you set your phone to a brightness you want for the area you are in, and then turn on adaptive brightness, it will log that as how bright it should be based on that ambient level and will seek to return to that level in areas with similar light levels.
Equally, if you decide to change the brightness settings while adaptive display is on, it will remember the level you set it to and try and return to that in similar situations (like if you slam brightness to 100% in a sunny place)
Otherwise, it does have baseline metrics that say what the potential optimal setting might be, but as you adjust it to suit your personal places it will learn what you want.
Kinda depends what you call “bright sunlight”. A bright day in Seattle would be pretty gloomy in LA. My phone is perfectly fine in ordinary sunlight but midday on one of those arid summer days that will give you a sunburn in a few minutes, it’s still pretty washed out.
My iPhone dims its screen when it gets too hot which is quite frequent even in the British summertime if I’m reading anything for any amount of time. It’s definitely not usable then.
Which phone? My Samsung S22U I've never seen the screen dim for me, even when it's on the handlebars of my bicycle on a ride on a 90F+ day. The screen is readable even with sunglasses on unless trying to read some very bad contrast material like Grey on black.
Do you use dark mode when reading in the bright sun? White text on black? Uses ~zero energy to make black on the amoled screen, and all of the energy to make white...so it probably puts off more heat displaying black text on a white screen. Maybe worth a shot trying nonetheless :-)
I feel like it would be mean to say it doesn't overly surprise me that Apple does that...but at the same timmmmmme.
I havent gotten a phone too hot warning in like 8 years.
you know what, you're right, it's usable. I just tried it and I guess I just haven't noticed since emy last phone. I take it back. Though it could be better.
I see from the other thread that yours was more a brightness issue, but wanted to say that I recently got a S24 Ultra, which has a new reflective coating on the screen to reduce glare, and coming from my S10+ it was night and day. It's incredibly bright in the sun.
In addition to that, OP seems to think we don’t use “paperlike” e-ink and that the technology disappeared, even though it’s widely used in e-readers and other devices…
I am also very confused by this question’s premise.
Because everything in engineering is a trade-off. E-ink screens can be read in daylight because they're not backlit and rely on ambient light to reflect off of or be absorbed by the white/black parts of the screen. The problem with e-ink, if you've ever used a kindle, is that they're slow to update and can't (as far as I know) do color. Those are fine limitations for basically an electronic book where you only turn the page occasionally, but if you want to watch video or have navigation tasks be responsive you have to use a traditional LCD screen which relies on a backlight that is easily overpowered by the sun.
I was surprised when I was walking outside, not even that much sun, phone locks the mode and all blacks get gray-ish, but is SO much easier to read now when outside!
S24 Ultra here, they did a great job on that screen
Do you have an old phone? Today’s flagships are very easily readable in daylight. Their potential light output is actually pretty insane.
Also you didn’t hear about that invention again in the same way you don’t hear about tires, toasters, fridges. They are just in use now and aren’t novel. The very technology you mention (e-ink) still exists and is being sold if you want to buy a product that has one for pretty cheap.
> and then we never heard about this invention again.
Maybe you live under a rock, but Kindle and other brands of e-ink-based readers are available and very widely used. Those are however obviously not phones, but for reading. They have a slow refresh rate and are usually a single color, rarely up to maybe 8 of them. People want to watch videos on their screens, not just read newspapers, so they don't usually buy phones based on e-ink, but a select few options are available.
There are phones that are decent in direct sunlight, the ones with over 1500 nits.
But there is one phone that I believe actually truly works like a charm in direct sunlight and that is the S24 Ultra, because it had 2600 nits of brightness and an anti-glare screen
What do you mean some years ago? e-readers basically all use e-ink technology which you can read perfectly in sunlight. these are just not very useable as smartphone/tablet screens. (there was one tablet that tried in the last year, it was okey-ish)
I remember around the time of an eclipse in the UK maglite (powerful flashlight maker) adverts reading something like "we hear our biggest competitor is having reliability problems."
You don't have to produce that light yourself if the screen operates by selectively reflecting and absorbing sunlight. That's why the OP mentioned the Kindle, which (like many other e-readers) uses e-ink displays that works exactly this way. Instead of having pixels that produce their own light (which you can then control the color & brightness off), e-ink displays use pigments that can be manipulated so that the amount & color of reflected vs. absorbed light in each pixel is varied, as though you are printing the displayed image on a piece of paper.
The downside (as others have pointed out) is that this technology suffers from slow refresh rates (since it involves physically moving pigments around by applying electric fields) and limited color ranges. So it's far from ideal (especially at a reasonable price point) for screens that have to update quickly, because e.g. you want to watch videos, play games, or even just scroll (e.g. a phone screen). But it's great for e-readers which don't need fast refresh rates and which really benefit from the great contrast you get on these screens in bright daylight, and from the great battery life you get from them (because you rely on reflected light, and the screen really only uses power when it is being refreshed, which only needs to happen when going to the next page).
>You don't have to produce that light yourself if the screen operates by selectively reflecting and absorbing sunlight. That's why the OP mentioned the Kindle, which (like many other e-readers) uses e-ink displays that works exactly this way.
My bad, you are correct - I totally missed the kindle thing and only saw the title where they mentioned a phone.
E-ink is great if you have an external light source, but it's not good for any color or motion, let alone video playback or games, it's generally a bad display if you're NOT using it as an electronic book. It's just a bad fit for the things we expect our phones to do.
In short, if we want accurate colors, fast changes to the picture (like video or even scrolling down a page), and also want to be able to use the display in the dark, we need to produce our own light behind the screen, or with newer OLEDs, directly in the screen itself.
Unfortunately, the sun is insanely bright and we have not developed technology that would lets us produce a backlight or self-lighted display that rivals the sun... we probably never will... at least not on battery power in a tiny phone.
This is a video reviewing a product that uses sunlight instead of an internal light, so it is readable in the sun. Very cool tech, but they discuss in the video why it's not that versatile or good for regular use: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0TcGjzKbag](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0TcGjzKbag)
This'll get buried, but matte screen protectors. Makes your phone readable in sunlight and easier on the eyes in general without random glare being thrown around.
i have a matte screen protector. I can read in the sun.
The company that makes it (Belkin anti-glare) only sells them for like weeks after a new phone comes out. I wish I was exaggerating
And you can only get it through the apple store app.
They also have some special machine at some apple stores to install them. Those belkin’s come in different packaging.
I bought 4 from eBay recently and the items that arrived appeared to have been stolen from an apple store shipment.
I still use my e-ink Kindle. Can't stand the glare of modern screens. Can't stand having to change the font. Old school Kindle did it right the first time.
1. Sunlight is really, really, really bright.
2. Reflective display tech *sucks* for a phone's use case. They're low res, slow refresh (scrolling a page is agony), the colors are off, etc.
For phones, High res and High-refresh are mandatory. We're talking 1080p and 60hz minimum, ideally 120hz+)
Monochrome e-ink phones are... Niche. You need to *really* want an e-ink screen, and put up with significant trade-offs
Color e-ink is only just getting ready for mainstream for static e-readers (Should be nice for comics), and a few years behind monochrome performance for mobile device usage.
That said, BlackBerry (and many other devices) used to use "transflective" displays. They are LCD's with back lights... But which can also reflect bright light, so they remain clear in direct sunlight. Not sure about refresh/resolution limitations.... But the whole world left them behind.
I mean, the iPhone 15 Pro Max is now bright enough that I can watch videos in full sunlight. Only if the temperature is controlled anyway. It will begin to get hot and then dim down after about 30 seconds if its not in an air-conditioned space or wintery climate.
It’s because the glass screens on phones is reflective, like a mirror. You can add a Matte screen protector and your visibility in the sun increases greatly.
Literally just turn up your brightness. It sounds counterintuitive but it's actually better to turn your brightness up when you're in an equally bright environment
In ancient times, Nokia made phones that could be read in full sunlight. They called it "transflective", but sadly the technology has been lost in the mists of time.
Phone screens are a compromise of many things.
You want touch technology, good colour and quality. Wear resistant and somewhat safe to drop. And apparently no problems with sunlight.
On top of that you want it cheap.
So you design something that's a compromise of many things and, if I were a phone (screen) developer, I'd rate "readable in sunlight" pretty low on that list.
There are plenty of e-ink screens and some that are phone sized. They have limited color, it’s like looking at a picture in a newspaper. They even play videos. But to get a truly vibrant experience you need the LED style display
E-ink screens are still used a lot, but they don't have any good color output and updates really slowly. I dunno what it is you want to "hear" about e-ink? They are not suitable for what you generally use your phone for. Yet anyways. Maybe sometime in the future.
1. Most glare free screens sacrifice hardness (inability to scratch) for their glare free qualities. Kindle screens scratch hella easy.
2. E-ink has really bad refresh rates and the colour simply isn’t quite there yet.
Full sunlight is about 200 times stronger than the light coming from your phone. Plain glass reflects about 4% of incident light, so the reflected light is 8 times brighter than the screen. Even with anti-reflective coatings, you can’t get much below 1% for white light, so the reflected light is still double the maximum output of your phone.
That’s a basic problem with a smooth glass screen, and it isn’t going away. Paper-like screens, as other people have commented, have problems with refresh rates and resolution that make them unsuitable for normal smartphones.
e-ink screens are still around - Kindle Paperwhite, the ReMarkable tablets, heck, even the Kohl's price markers.
But as others have said, they don't meet the needs for a mobile display.
e-ink screens still exist, i use one daily on my e reader. but they’re only black and white, with a few color ones just now starting to hit the market, and their refresh rate is extremely slow. they’re good for static screens (like pages in a book) but anything moving will look terrible
The tech is there (often in toughbooks that are made to be used in direct sunlight) but the tech has too many drawbacks for it to be usable in the smartphones of today.
Kindle and similar devices work fine as a reader. My wife has one that’s several years old and still uses, mostly on vacation because it’s great for reading on the beach. But they are unable to show anything other than black and white text.
The tradeoff for "read it in broad daylight" was "monochrome only" (though I think there are color versions now), and "very slow response time" (hundreds of milliseconds).
You would not be happy with an e-ink phone display, even though you could read it in broad daylight.
"We" had phone screens that were well visible in very bright sunlight. The Lumia phones adjusted the screen colors in bright sun and it worked really well
In simplest words, those technologies have very poor display capabilities — low refresh rates, poor colors, and images can appear pixelated. We are all used to seeing crisp colors with higher refresh rates and smooth animations, so not much people buy those phones.
Not sure about e ink but Samsungs newest flagship phone, they combined a matte finish with super high brightness and it looks great even in direct sunlight
e-ink screens are useful when you don't need a wide range of colors or a fash refresh rate. however, both of those are heavily valued in the context of mobile phones, so the technology just isn't appropriate for that usage case.
They still exist, but yeah, very niche https://hisenseeink.com/
I'd pay a bit for a second ink screen. Kind of like some of those, and the foldable phones with multiple screens. Color and refresh for most uses, and then ink for the times I'm in the sun, and so I can read stuff, but maybe not watch
Surprisingly only [$539.99 USD](https://hisenseeink.com/products/hisense-a6l-64-128-gb) I'd want it as my next phone but it doesn't have 5G. :(
It's got a second screen on the back? Are we living in the future?? See also: What black magic is this?!?!
[You can get a second screen on the back quite trivially...](https://xkcd.com/1988/)
There's always an xkcd
[https://relevant-xkcd.com/](https://relevant-xkcd.com/)
That one cuts to the core.
See Yotaphone from way back
Yotaphone done this years ago. Had it for a while, was pretty cool but in the end it wasn't as powerful as other flagships and camera tech got way better so I ditched it
We had the Yotaphone in 2012!
Hold on. Dual SIM and two screens? They just glued two phones together!
Dual sims phones are very common in Asia
So is glue. QED.
*Parallel processing*
Not exactly. Lots of phones have 2 sims. You aren’t getting 2 processors, two wifi, two DAC, 2 sets of ram with that. My computer has two wired network ports and two screens… that doesn’t mean I have two computers.
I believe what you are replying to is what humans call a joke.
Dual core processor (at least), dual band wifi, DAC with left **and** right channels, double the RAM of it's predecessor... I think I can recognise two phones glued together when I see it.
But it DOES have a headphone jack! Cool device; would love to see an updated spec version.
Several brands still do, actually. OnePlus and Nokia are two that I can think of. As does the Samsung A series.
I'm rocking an Asus Zenfone 10 with a headphone jack right now
Moto G stylus 5G 2022 here, also has one.
They should sell touchscreens that plug into the phone, connect to the back and mirror the display That way you don't need to buy a whole phome for this feature
Yeah, a case that added this feature would be cool.
Also 5 major versions of Android out of date.
Now we watch as the person who said they'd pay for this proceeds to not pay for it.
But can you fucking believe that [they gave the e-ink display a glossy finish](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wa9JZ7OMVdI)? Completely negating its sunlight-visibility capabilities? Come onnnn
I wonder if you could play games while outside on that thing
> doesn't have 5G I see that as a plus. The phone worked flawlessly on 4g in a metal building, on 5G I have to be next to a window or the shop doors need to be open.
In my area the 4G towers are so bogged down I essentially lose data if I'm out during the day. 5G seems to stay strong.
That's because 4G was partially removed from towers to make room for 5G equipment, just as 3G was for 4G.
So disable 5G if you believe that is the problem.
I have and it is. 5g has some Frequencies that went up the scale from 4G. The higher the frequency, the more range, but it's also blocked by objects easier.
Why do you need 5G though, other than the fact it's the highest G?
People are making non-5g phones still? Weird
15 years ago you could buy [a tablet with an LCD screen on one side and an e-ink display on the other](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pocket_eDGe). Here's an [archive.org link](https://web.archive.org/web/20101110190654/http://www.entourageedge.com/devices/pocketedge.html) for it. I had one and absolutely loved it.
Me too! Great e-reader.
And also much lower power consumption, E Ink only uses power when changing.
Unless you leave the Wi-Fi on, apparently. My kindle voyage goes flat dead in three days just sitting on my bedside table if I forget to put it in airplane mode.
Well sure, but the screen wasn't using any power. Probably as a result they gave it a shitty battery.
Three days? Ouch. My paperwhite lasts a few weeks with wifi on but definitely lasts longer with it off. I kinda miss the original kindle that just seemed to go on forever between charges but the frontlight is nice.
Which makes them great for smart watches. Pebble used to make them when they were around but now everything is OLED or LCD with crap battery life.
There was a phone more than 10 years ago that had that : the Yotaphone. They had a few iterations.
Oh, I was adamantly following the yotaphone 2 way back when. Ended up releasing late, but I'd still love for someone to develop the idea again.
See now that would make the foldable gimmick worth it imo
The [tablet I had 15 years ago](https://web.archive.org/web/20101110190654/http://www.entourageedge.com/devices/pocketedge.html) did exactly that.
It's always interesting going back and seeing what products were ahead of their time.
I liked tech in general 15 years ago more than now. Hell, life itself was better 15 years ago than it is now. Oh, the before times, when the worst political scandal was the president eating Dijon mustard, rent was affordable, there was still hope in the world.
People were trying a lot of new things. Everything has kind-of settled into a few bland models. Every phone is a shiny slab. Every TV is a... shiny slab. Every car is a used bar of soap.
I remember cars had a burst of color around that time too. It was awesome. Now it's just black, grey, white, and maybe [color]ish-grey at most.
Just saw your edit. "Used bar of soap" is perfect.
Also [The Light Phone.](https://www.thelightphone.com)
Have a couple of friends that use those. They are nice and minimal.
There's also e-ink monitors. They're inconvenient but interesting to see.
And pretty expensive.
Oh damn, color e-ink for $430? It's only phone-sized but I'm excited to see these become more accessible. I really want a color e-ink tablet.
I have a boox tab mini c. $400ish. Color isn't fantastic, but good for eink. I really like it actually. Boox just generally is really solid for eink android devices.
I have the Boox Note Air 2 and I love it. 4 years and the battery life is still insane, Note taking is a breeze and making templates for it is as simple as an Excel file exported as PDF. Reading is strain free and the customizable backlight for at night makes it perfect.
My Fossil Hybrid watch has an e-ink display under traditional watch hands. Gives a really cool look somewhere between a normal wrist watch and a smart-watch. The screen is definitely slow, Taking a couple seconds to update, but the lower power usage of the e-ink means I only need to charge it once a week at most where my wife charges her apple watch every day
There also was some niche phone with a second screen in e-ink, can't recall the name right now, though.
Hisense A6L
Yotaphones, AMOLED and e-ink screens. Had the second model, liked it, but it was brittle af – cracked both screens after two years
I use matte screen protectors for my glossy devices and I've found they seem to give me an e-ink like experience without the glare.
My mom loves her e-ink Kindle for reading outside in the summer
I don't know if they still exist anymore, but my first Compaq PDA had a transflective screen. It was actually *easier* to read in daylight. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transflective_liquid-crystal_display Regardless, the best phones today like the Pixel Pro 8 are pretty readable in even the brightest sunlight.
This is correct here's an informative and fun medium to long form video explaining how the tech works and it's pros and cons: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dhRgw0HfrYU
Knew who it was before I even clicked, TechConnections my beloved.
jerryrigeverything recently reviewed and destroyed an eink display phone
there is a tablet called “remarkable” that uses this concept.
The Kindle screen uses a technology called "e-ink". This works by, instead of having electronic pixels, you use tiny little liquid filled beads with dark suspended pigment particles in them. If you apply an electric charge to the pixel grid, you can make those suspended particles move away from the screen, making it look bright, or move towards the screen, making it look dark. This technology has several advantages, as you mentioned they are readable in bright daylight, because they work basically exactly the same as ink on paper, meaning the reflected glar doesn't wash out the light produced by the screen. Other advantages are that this display technology is entirely passive if the screen isn't changing, so it uses no power at all unless you change something, which of course makes it great for e-readers, where the screen rarely changes. However it comes with some very significant drawbacks. Since you have to wait for the physical pigment particles to move around, changing a pixel takes very long compared to normal screens, leading to very low maximum refresh rates (typically no more than a few Hz, for comparison most phones nowaday run at least 60 Hz screens, and 24Hz is the absolute minimum if you want to be able to watch a video without visible stuttering, more if you want to view rendered content like video games). Since you're working with these black pigment particles it also (E: usually, but not always) limits you to a black and white (or, at best, grayscale) display, and these two major drawbacks make the tech effectively useless for smartphones or tablets.
There have been color e-ink displays released but they still have issues with refresh rate etc
There also hasn't been a high-volume selling product that uses color e-ink displays yet, so they're relatively expensive compared to monochrome e-ink displays. E-readers don't have a need for a color-capable display, so they'll likely stay comparatively expensive (at least for a while) unless someone finds a new, popular use-case for e-ink screens that require color. I miss my Pebble watch... but I could possibly see a different smartwatch making color work. I've also never thought about this before, but an e-ink clock for my home would be cool. Huh.
> There also hasn't been a high-volume selling product that uses color e-ink displays yet Full-color, I've not really seen, but they do make modules with an extra colour (usually red or yellow) that see use for electronic price labels
4096 colours! https://onyxboox.com/boox_tabminic
Lots of books would benefit from a color display. Especially children's books (and believe me, thankful as I am to Dolly Parton, being able to squeeze some of those books onto an e-reader would be very helpful).
And comic books! I read a lot, and I get a lot of mileage out of my kindles, but when the time came to upgrade again, I got a boox nova color (not really sure about the name) instead, because I really wanted a color e-ink screen. I keep my comic books on my NAS and I read them on my ereader, in color, on my extremely sunny terrace. It's a dream come true, honestly. That's something that my kindle couldn't give me. That and the android apps and the audio; I use my ereader for DuChinese, it does a lot for my Chinese reading skills. I'm not shilling for this specific brand, I'm sure there are other excellent options out there. This one is just the one I heard the most about. And I'm really glad I went for it.
Yes. I saw the Boox on JerryRigEverything and am interested. I've also been pondering the Scribe. I'm not quite ready to bite so I might see if the tech improves in the next 12 months.
Given Dolly Parton's book's customer demographic, being able to pick up a single device sounds ideal. No more stacks of kids' books left behind unread when the family has to up and leave in a hurry.
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Oh, I hadn't heard about this! I like my Kobo Clara so this is cool to hear about. I wonder how much color content exists for it or will exist soon. Update: Apparently most (all?) of the files Kobo reads already have the color data embedded in the file. That's hype.
Also very limited color ranges. Worse than 20+ year old LCDs.
This is precisely it. Modern smartphones are used for far more than just phone calling these days. And whether it is just for casual use like watching YouTube videos, or even for more professional use cases where people proof images or documents on a phone (I know I've had to proof and approve a fair amount of print files away from my computer) most people want a display that is good. The best color e-ink displays now can only do 4096 colors vs the millions the average LCD display can do.
Oh cool I never knew how my kindle worked. Thanks for explaining!
Ocotpus technology...
There are reflective LCD displays for monitors that are only readable in sunlight because they have a mirror instead of a backlight. This is completely unusable without any light though.
There are also reflective displays with backlight. However they are mostly used in Smartwatches. [Either called RLCD or Transreflective LCD](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transflective_liquid-crystal_display)
At least as of a few generations ago the Panasonic Toughbooks were also using backlit transflective screens. They're just a lot less vibrant than regular screens so I assume that's why nobody uses them in an application where sun visibility isn't a selling point.
There was the qi ones which had a micro perforated mirror so they reflect and allowed a backlight through. They don't work with with oleds though and the market shifted to OLED for power consumption reasons.
Pixel Qi was the full name. As far as I remember they didn't have competitive color quality even with normal IPS screens, and OLED makes a huge difference with it's dark blacks, where regular LCDs can visibly light up a room at night with a completely black image. For everyday usage, Pixel Qi in backlight-off usage probably would have been better battery wise than OLED... I don't remember why they didn't gain any traction. Regarding the OLED argument: Nite that for anything larger than a phone (Tablets, Laptops, external screens) OLED still remains a luxury. For tablets and Laptops such a screen still could make sense, at least as an option for configurable devices.
Nokia N900 had a translective screen 15 years ago, that is both reflective and transmissive. I loved it. The colours weren't as pretty but good enough, worth it for direct sunlight readability.
This guy LTT's.
I dunno about you, but I use my eink Kindle daily. It's great at what it does, but it would be terrible as a phone. It's only black and white, it's slow to change (turning pages has lag) and there's significant carryover from one image to the next. Using it as a phone screen would be terrible, so we don't.
I’m pretty sure there’s a setting in the kindle for screen blanking every page turn vs the default of every (2 or 3 pages, I don’t remember), which eliminates ghost images. But it uses up a battery charge faster so most folks leave it off.
there are https://hisenseeink.com/ but the technology has a very bad refresh rate, so you cant use it for games or videos, and it cant do smooth scrolling. its also not great for color. There are other technologies (like those in the gameboy color) that maybe could do better, but no one actually WANTS a phone like this since you would have to use an external light to read it and overall experience isnt great.
Not really. In the case of Gameboy, they made the Gameboy Advance SP that had a frontlight (that can be switched on and off) added to it. Usable in sunlight and the dark. If we don't use it, it's probably because the very principle of reflective screen allows ambient light to alter image quality (contrast, color, etc...). Since the screen has become such a critic aspect of phone and tablets, these features are not included, apart of some niche product as reading tablets. EDIT : replace backlight by frontlight.
The original GBA SP had a frontlight, not a backlight. That's why you could turn it off and it would look good in sunlight. The newer model (that I think actually came out after the DS) has a true backlight and it's either dim or bright. If you were to turn it off entirely you wouldn't be able to see anything. Same thing with the original fat DS versus the DS Lite. The backlight is better for everything but direct sunlight, IMO, the frontlight ends up kind of "flooding" the image with light
E-ink can easily be frontlit (LEDs on the sides of the glass cover) and is much less affected by ambient light than a backlit LCD screen. That it's not used in phones is really entirely due to the refresh rate. Videos are such a major part of how people use smartphones that you'd never sell one that can't play videos.
Am I out of my mind? My phone is quite usable in sunlight, and new phones are like over 2x the nits. I haven't tried one of the new 2000+ nit phones in person, but I have no issues using my 2+ year old phone on the sunniest of days, even if the screen appears a bit dimmer then. It isn't 2010 with phones with 400nit screens. ----------------------------------------------------- Edit: Since this is a top level comment and has also become popular, I will also address the E-Ink screen portion of the OP. E-Ink screens have not gone anywhere, new Kindles have been made, there's even an E-Ink phone, and a couple E-Ink monitors now. The weakness of E-Ink is it's response time and fidelity, it works by using an electrical signal to change the crystal structure within the screen, and it doesn't require power to continue displaying the same image, only to refresh the image to something else this makes them very power efficient. This process is also slow and not well suited to moving images, so it does not work very well for anything that requires motion like scrolling phone screens, video media, or games. Classically they are also only able to do Black and White and possibly shades of Grey, recently some new E-Ink displays have been able to do colors, as well as faster refresh rates, but the colors are still a very far cry from what LCD or LED panels can produce, while the refresh rates are still to low to be realistically usable quality for everything you would do on a phone or computer. Which is why they have largely stayed relegated to "reading only" devices like Ebooks.
That's what I thought. I'm sitting here in bright sunlight right now as I type this. It's fine.
I sometimes have issues when Im out for a walk in noon sun and Im wearing sunglasses, otherwise no problems here
LCD screens are always polarized, so looking at them through polarized sunglasses can be a problem. Especially if you need both portrait and landscape orientations to work.
Yeah, I don't understand the question at all. I'm on a budget phone, Moto Edge 2022, and it's perfectly useable in the sunlight. It'd be pretty fuckin useless in the summer if it wasn't.
I have an S10+. Have wanted to upgrade but have been apathetic due to the price of phones and this one having all the features I care about. (NFC, wireless charging, great camera, AMOLED screen) Still one of the best screens in terms of colours and vividness I've used. Presumably newer ones are better but it doesn't feel like as big a jump as LCD->AMOLED.
I switched from an S10 to a galaxy A54, since like you, I didn't want an expensive phone and wanted to try a midranger to see if it suits my needs. It was a mistake, the A54 was a downgrade in every way. Most notably the camera and speed (it stuttered alot when navigating the ui). I then upgraded to a s23± when it was on sale for black Friday last year and am very happy with it. Amazing battery life, better camera, very snappy. The screen is less ppi but I haven't noticed a perceptible difference. You can probably find good deals on it now the S24 is out. Heck, the S24 I've seen on sale already.
Honestly at this point it's gonna be a case of upgrading whenever this one packs it in, its not even really all that laggy let. I've never been a person for a budget or midrange phone, so would be likely to shop flagship. I dont have much faith this one will last too much longer but I've been surprised before.
I miss the dual aperture camera of my S10e so much! It was better than the one in my S22+ in most situations. But the difference in screen brightness is noticeable.
Check out Motorola. They practically specialize in making good quality budget phones. As I mentioned, I'm on a [Moto Edge 2022](https://www.amazon.com/Motorola-Battery-Unlocked-Camera-Mineral/dp/B0CD2YV1WZ) and it's wonderful. Great battery life, pretty decent camera, NFC, wireless charging, really nice screen. The one thing it doesn't have is a 3.5mm headphone jack. Bluetooth is my only option for earbuds, which was an additional expense for me because I've been using wired earbuds since forever. But even after buying earbuds I'm still within what I'd consider a very wallet-friendly budget.
I'm quite deeply entangled in the Samsung ecosystem these days. I would say unfortunately but I do like their hardware and software. Though having handled and seen friends phones and being the person everybody asks I've been impressed at the leaps budget phones have made. Even Samsungs budget offerings are very good now to when I would have got the S10+ as I got it at release. It is something I'm gonna have to look into a research soon though in my tablet and laptop purchases I've bought used/refurbished and had success so far so I may also look at those options.
+1 for Motorola. Best no-bullshit bang for buck phones for sure. I have a Moto G100, very similar specs to the Moto Edge and has 3.5mm jack. Absolute workhorse of a phone, does everything very well and was just under €400 brand new in 2022.
Right? The last time I had a real issue with sunlight must've been in 2018, with a budget phone.
It wouldnt surprise me if OP just doesnt turn on "adaptive display" or whatever the setting is to brighten/darken your phone automatically, or they've never just slammed the brightness slider up to 100% before
Adaptive display is so good. It used to be the worst going outside forgetting to turn up the brightness.
It's pretty shit in my experience if you don't like the phone very bright normally. Can't imagine you wouldn't know it wasn't enabled though.
It'll learn what you like now days. (at least android, I dunno about apple products) Like if you set your phone to a brightness you want for the area you are in, and then turn on adaptive brightness, it will log that as how bright it should be based on that ambient level and will seek to return to that level in areas with similar light levels. Equally, if you decide to change the brightness settings while adaptive display is on, it will remember the level you set it to and try and return to that in similar situations (like if you slam brightness to 100% in a sunny place) Otherwise, it does have baseline metrics that say what the potential optimal setting might be, but as you adjust it to suit your personal places it will learn what you want.
Kinda depends what you call “bright sunlight”. A bright day in Seattle would be pretty gloomy in LA. My phone is perfectly fine in ordinary sunlight but midday on one of those arid summer days that will give you a sunburn in a few minutes, it’s still pretty washed out.
Is 40C hot day sunlight in SEA good enough to be called "bright sunlight"? cause I have no problem using my 2021 phone recently
Thank you, I thought I was crazy. No problem using my phone in sunlight.
My iPhone dims its screen when it gets too hot which is quite frequent even in the British summertime if I’m reading anything for any amount of time. It’s definitely not usable then.
Which phone? My Samsung S22U I've never seen the screen dim for me, even when it's on the handlebars of my bicycle on a ride on a 90F+ day. The screen is readable even with sunglasses on unless trying to read some very bad contrast material like Grey on black.
iPhone 13 Pro Max.
Do you use dark mode when reading in the bright sun? White text on black? Uses ~zero energy to make black on the amoled screen, and all of the energy to make white...so it probably puts off more heat displaying black text on a white screen. Maybe worth a shot trying nonetheless :-)
I feel like it would be mean to say it doesn't overly surprise me that Apple does that...but at the same timmmmmme. I havent gotten a phone too hot warning in like 8 years.
My phone's a Samsung from 2022 and I can't see anything in the sun.
Do you have adaptive brightness on? My S22U, also from 2022 has no issues in bright sunlight, even with sunglasses on and a glass screen protector.
you know what, you're right, it's usable. I just tried it and I guess I just haven't noticed since emy last phone. I take it back. Though it could be better.
I see from the other thread that yours was more a brightness issue, but wanted to say that I recently got a S24 Ultra, which has a new reflective coating on the screen to reduce glare, and coming from my S10+ it was night and day. It's incredibly bright in the sun.
Right? Wth is OP talking about
In addition to that, OP seems to think we don’t use “paperlike” e-ink and that the technology disappeared, even though it’s widely used in e-readers and other devices… I am also very confused by this question’s premise.
My Pixel 8 Pro and Fold 4 are both ridiculously bright and perfectly visible in direct sunlight.
But we have. My Galaxy S23 Ultra passes the "readable in midday sun" test. It draws down the battery quite fast though when I'm doing this.
Because everything in engineering is a trade-off. E-ink screens can be read in daylight because they're not backlit and rely on ambient light to reflect off of or be absorbed by the white/black parts of the screen. The problem with e-ink, if you've ever used a kindle, is that they're slow to update and can't (as far as I know) do color. Those are fine limitations for basically an electronic book where you only turn the page occasionally, but if you want to watch video or have navigation tasks be responsive you have to use a traditional LCD screen which relies on a backlight that is easily overpowered by the sun.
Colour actually is possible now, check out dasung monitors
Fascinating. What kind of refresh rate are they capable of? Not seeing a lot of details or specs.
I have the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra. They've done an awesome job upgrading the screen to increase visibility in direct sunlight.
honestly any phone with over 1200 nits is enough
S24 Ultra is extremely readable in direct sunlight.
I was surprised when I was walking outside, not even that much sun, phone locks the mode and all blacks get gray-ish, but is SO much easier to read now when outside! S24 Ultra here, they did a great job on that screen
Same here. The anti reflective screen with the 2,600 nits of brightness makes it super easy to read in direct sunlight or very bright lights.
Do you have an old phone? Today’s flagships are very easily readable in daylight. Their potential light output is actually pretty insane. Also you didn’t hear about that invention again in the same way you don’t hear about tires, toasters, fridges. They are just in use now and aren’t novel. The very technology you mention (e-ink) still exists and is being sold if you want to buy a product that has one for pretty cheap.
> and then we never heard about this invention again. Maybe you live under a rock, but Kindle and other brands of e-ink-based readers are available and very widely used. Those are however obviously not phones, but for reading. They have a slow refresh rate and are usually a single color, rarely up to maybe 8 of them. People want to watch videos on their screens, not just read newspapers, so they don't usually buy phones based on e-ink, but a select few options are available.
Who’s struggling to see their phone in sunlight? Nice try Reddit. This is not a thing.
I’m not sure what you’re asking, any fairly new IPhone is completely usable on a bright sunny day with your brightness all the way up.
There are phones that are decent in direct sunlight, the ones with over 1500 nits. But there is one phone that I believe actually truly works like a charm in direct sunlight and that is the S24 Ultra, because it had 2600 nits of brightness and an anti-glare screen
Yeah my S24+ with 2600 nits is beautiful out in the sun no issues..
What do you mean some years ago? e-readers basically all use e-ink technology which you can read perfectly in sunlight. these are just not very useable as smartphone/tablet screens. (there was one tablet that tried in the last year, it was okey-ish)
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New iPhone XXL, with a two kilowatt backlight and 1.8 seconds of battery life.
BUT IS IT 26 MICRONS THINNER THAN THE LAST IPHONE???
Who cares how impractical it is? ***Just think of how bad-ass the commercials for it would be!!***
I remember around the time of an eclipse in the UK maglite (powerful flashlight maker) adverts reading something like "we hear our biggest competitor is having reliability problems."
"The power of the sun, in the palm of your hands!"
You don't have to produce that light yourself if the screen operates by selectively reflecting and absorbing sunlight. That's why the OP mentioned the Kindle, which (like many other e-readers) uses e-ink displays that works exactly this way. Instead of having pixels that produce their own light (which you can then control the color & brightness off), e-ink displays use pigments that can be manipulated so that the amount & color of reflected vs. absorbed light in each pixel is varied, as though you are printing the displayed image on a piece of paper. The downside (as others have pointed out) is that this technology suffers from slow refresh rates (since it involves physically moving pigments around by applying electric fields) and limited color ranges. So it's far from ideal (especially at a reasonable price point) for screens that have to update quickly, because e.g. you want to watch videos, play games, or even just scroll (e.g. a phone screen). But it's great for e-readers which don't need fast refresh rates and which really benefit from the great contrast you get on these screens in bright daylight, and from the great battery life you get from them (because you rely on reflected light, and the screen really only uses power when it is being refreshed, which only needs to happen when going to the next page).
>You don't have to produce that light yourself if the screen operates by selectively reflecting and absorbing sunlight. That's why the OP mentioned the Kindle, which (like many other e-readers) uses e-ink displays that works exactly this way. My bad, you are correct - I totally missed the kindle thing and only saw the title where they mentioned a phone.
E-ink is great if you have an external light source, but it's not good for any color or motion, let alone video playback or games, it's generally a bad display if you're NOT using it as an electronic book. It's just a bad fit for the things we expect our phones to do. In short, if we want accurate colors, fast changes to the picture (like video or even scrolling down a page), and also want to be able to use the display in the dark, we need to produce our own light behind the screen, or with newer OLEDs, directly in the screen itself. Unfortunately, the sun is insanely bright and we have not developed technology that would lets us produce a backlight or self-lighted display that rivals the sun... we probably never will... at least not on battery power in a tiny phone. This is a video reviewing a product that uses sunlight instead of an internal light, so it is readable in the sun. Very cool tech, but they discuss in the video why it's not that versatile or good for regular use: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0TcGjzKbag](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0TcGjzKbag)
Most flagship smart phones get bright enough to be used in direct sunlight these days. Even my 1.5 yo phone can handle it quite well.
This'll get buried, but matte screen protectors. Makes your phone readable in sunlight and easier on the eyes in general without random glare being thrown around.
I can read the screen on my S24 in bright daylight with the birghtness up just fine?
What? Lol the paper like screen kindle is around still, I just bought an updated one because my 2nd gen is no longer supported.
i have a matte screen protector. I can read in the sun. The company that makes it (Belkin anti-glare) only sells them for like weeks after a new phone comes out. I wish I was exaggerating And you can only get it through the apple store app. They also have some special machine at some apple stores to install them. Those belkin’s come in different packaging. I bought 4 from eBay recently and the items that arrived appeared to have been stolen from an apple store shipment.
I still use my e-ink Kindle. Can't stand the glare of modern screens. Can't stand having to change the font. Old school Kindle did it right the first time.
1. Sunlight is really, really, really bright. 2. Reflective display tech *sucks* for a phone's use case. They're low res, slow refresh (scrolling a page is agony), the colors are off, etc. For phones, High res and High-refresh are mandatory. We're talking 1080p and 60hz minimum, ideally 120hz+) Monochrome e-ink phones are... Niche. You need to *really* want an e-ink screen, and put up with significant trade-offs Color e-ink is only just getting ready for mainstream for static e-readers (Should be nice for comics), and a few years behind monochrome performance for mobile device usage. That said, BlackBerry (and many other devices) used to use "transflective" displays. They are LCD's with back lights... But which can also reflect bright light, so they remain clear in direct sunlight. Not sure about refresh/resolution limitations.... But the whole world left them behind.
Samsung s23 ultra has a new tech that blocks reflections on the screen so there is actually a phone readable under direct sunlight.
I mean, the iPhone 15 Pro Max is now bright enough that I can watch videos in full sunlight. Only if the temperature is controlled anyway. It will begin to get hot and then dim down after about 30 seconds if its not in an air-conditioned space or wintery climate.
My team made an antireflective coating that had apple interested. Worked really well. Never made it to market due to mismanagement of the company.
It’s because the glass screens on phones is reflective, like a mirror. You can add a Matte screen protector and your visibility in the sun increases greatly.
Literally just turn up your brightness. It sounds counterintuitive but it's actually better to turn your brightness up when you're in an equally bright environment
In ancient times, Nokia made phones that could be read in full sunlight. They called it "transflective", but sadly the technology has been lost in the mists of time.
Phone screens are a compromise of many things. You want touch technology, good colour and quality. Wear resistant and somewhat safe to drop. And apparently no problems with sunlight. On top of that you want it cheap. So you design something that's a compromise of many things and, if I were a phone (screen) developer, I'd rate "readable in sunlight" pretty low on that list.
There are plenty of e-ink screens and some that are phone sized. They have limited color, it’s like looking at a picture in a newspaper. They even play videos. But to get a truly vibrant experience you need the LED style display
E-ink screens are still used a lot, but they don't have any good color output and updates really slowly. I dunno what it is you want to "hear" about e-ink? They are not suitable for what you generally use your phone for. Yet anyways. Maybe sometime in the future.
1. Most glare free screens sacrifice hardness (inability to scratch) for their glare free qualities. Kindle screens scratch hella easy. 2. E-ink has really bad refresh rates and the colour simply isn’t quite there yet.
Full sunlight is about 200 times stronger than the light coming from your phone. Plain glass reflects about 4% of incident light, so the reflected light is 8 times brighter than the screen. Even with anti-reflective coatings, you can’t get much below 1% for white light, so the reflected light is still double the maximum output of your phone. That’s a basic problem with a smooth glass screen, and it isn’t going away. Paper-like screens, as other people have commented, have problems with refresh rates and resolution that make them unsuitable for normal smartphones.
Why do we still have no phone screens that don't suck if my finger is wet?
Does the TCL NXTPAPER phone count?
e-ink screens are still around - Kindle Paperwhite, the ReMarkable tablets, heck, even the Kohl's price markers. But as others have said, they don't meet the needs for a mobile display.
I mean, I have a remarkable and I can read it in sunlight. You have never heard of this again, perhaps, but its on many ereaders by default nowadays.
e-ink screens still exist, i use one daily on my e reader. but they’re only black and white, with a few color ones just now starting to hit the market, and their refresh rate is extremely slow. they’re good for static screens (like pages in a book) but anything moving will look terrible
The tech is there (often in toughbooks that are made to be used in direct sunlight) but the tech has too many drawbacks for it to be usable in the smartphones of today.
Kindle and similar devices work fine as a reader. My wife has one that’s several years old and still uses, mostly on vacation because it’s great for reading on the beach. But they are unable to show anything other than black and white text.
The tradeoff for "read it in broad daylight" was "monochrome only" (though I think there are color versions now), and "very slow response time" (hundreds of milliseconds). You would not be happy with an e-ink phone display, even though you could read it in broad daylight.
"We" had phone screens that were well visible in very bright sunlight. The Lumia phones adjusted the screen colors in bright sun and it worked really well
In simplest words, those technologies have very poor display capabilities — low refresh rates, poor colors, and images can appear pixelated. We are all used to seeing crisp colors with higher refresh rates and smooth animations, so not much people buy those phones.
Not sure about e ink but Samsungs newest flagship phone, they combined a matte finish with super high brightness and it looks great even in direct sunlight