E-Ink Android phone promises a week long battery life

I dream of one day when someone will make a minimalist phone that meets my needs. The perfect phone for me would be this:<p>- Can make and receive calls and texts.<p>- Has a phone book (just a name/number key-value pair).<p>- Has a clock and timer/alarm.<p>- NO OTHER SOFTWARE FEATURES. Nothing extra other than calls, texts, phone book, time.<p>- Small e-ink display.<p>- Simple T9 keypad.<p>- Rugged construction, should be able to take a lot of abuse. Should not feel cheap.<p>- Small and thin.<p>- Tons of battery life.<p>- Beautiful, minimalist visual design.<p>- Cheap enough that you can lose it without feeling bad.<p>That's all I want - something optimized for calls and texts, nothing more or less. It would be a cheap phone to produce, I think. Would there be any market for this?<p>EDIT: the Motofone looks like it's kind of like this (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Fone" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Fone</a>), but it has a segmented display (bad for texts), and it sounds like it feels a bit cheap. It could also be prettier.

I have a crazy idea, how about a touch LCD phone that is:<p>1) actually small enough to fit in my pocket<p>2) Not PoS 3 years out-of-date hardware designed so that the phone company can offer a "free" smartphone.<p>The smaller screen would probably greatly improve battery life.

For what it's worth: Onyx, the manufacturer, only half-heartedly support their current e-ink readers, leaving lots of annoying bugs unfixed. However, there are very concrete rumors that Android is also being ported to the some Onyx e-ink readers [1].<p>[1] <a href="http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showpost.php?p=2237483&#38;postcount=23" rel="nofollow">http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showpost.php?p=2237483&#38;...</a>

I wish for a dual screen mobile (one side LCD and other side E-Ink)

Is "week long battery life" really a killer feature? As long as a phone has enough battery to make it through the 16 hours per day most of us are awake, anything more is just gold plating.<p>Just how big is the "week long battery life" niche?

This could become an awesome secondary travel/camping phone. Sure when I'm home I generally remember to charge my phone every or every other night, but when out and about there are many times when charging is inconvenient of impossible.

If it has USB OTG and allows installing custom Linux software, I'm sold.<p>Current status: [USB Host on the Kindle 4](<a href="http://www.christian-hoff.com/?p=139" rel="nofollow">http://www.christian-hoff.com/?p=139</a>)

I have been thinking about a responsive e-ink for some time.<p>What I would love is a responsive e-ink screen to use for text editing, Imagine a large responsive e-ink screen that you can use for coding, reading, etc...<p>Although for coding it would also need some basic colours.

It could be useful in India or African countries with not much access to energy. But I doubt people from developed nations would want this. It most likely offers nowhere near the experience of an LCD device. Remember, besides the lack of color issue, e-ink devices work best when the on-screen image is static, and not changing often.

The difficult part of making an e-ink Android, or applying an e-ink display to a general-purpose platform is that the way screen-drawing is implemented has not been designed with e-ink in mind.<p>The display might either seem "flashy" because the full screen is blanked and drawn for every update, or the screen gets "muddy" because the graphics stack isn't keeping track of how many times a screen areas has been rewritten without being reset.<p>Page-at-a-time updates, like those between pages of a book, are the most compatible with how e-ink works.

Would be useful to have as a second screen. Dual touch maybe? eink for phone functions (60% of the time in my case) and lcd for when you need the fullcolor display (GPS mode, movie mode, web browsing)?

I wouldn't buy it, due to not really being able to see photos on an e-ink display. I've just become so use to color. Great idea though, especially for people that travel a lot, go camping etc...<p>It doesn't seem that snappy right now speed wise. Not sure if thats the phone or Android though (I'm not a big Android user), but nonetheless, cool stuff.

Not bad at all, but then again a IMOD display would be better: its in color and it has much faster refresh rates so it can play video and use touch UIs just like in any LCD.<p>It has some downsides compared to regular screens but it looks even better than eInk and has similar advantages like low energy use.

My 30 euro simple Nokia phone has a week long battery life, and I'm pretty sure the user experience it offers will be a lot better than an e-ink Android phone.

I'd take a black and white screen with the promise of better battery life if the display was at least as functional in all other aspects

e-ink isn't suitable for anything that moves, so it's only going to be good for a really basic phone + contacts + text messaging device. Android seems like massive overkill and a waste of battery for those relatively simple tasks. I think there is still demand for a high quality phone that is light on features and inexpensive.

I'd replace my Droid RAZR with one of these in a heartbeat...