E Ink technology has been perceived as something associated only with e-readers and such devices, but now it’s making an entry on the handset market. The upside of this tech is the great readability in tough lighting conditions and its great battery saving abilities, since it draws very little power from the battery. Now there’s a prototype phone from Onyx that adopts this type of screen.
And now let’s get to the flaws: it has lag and can’t display colors. Onyx International is behind the device, that gets demoed below in an interesting 7 minute long clip. YouTube user Charbax compares the device to a Galaxy Nexus outdoor, in a sunny day, showing the advantage of this type of screen. The weird thing here is that the Galaxy Nexus is supposed to be set at maximum brightness, but it doesn’t look like that to me. You should know that using such a display, you will be able to draw so little power, that the handset’s battery would last for a full week.
Rumors say that this prototype phone runs Android 2.3 Gingerbread and inside there’s an ARM Cortex A5 processor, most probably a Qualcomm MSM7227A. The problem here is that the device doesn’t work smoothly and the lag is a big problem. However, when you hear about a week of battery life and only 70 grams of weight, this phone suddenly sounds mint, right? What will you be willing to sacrifice for those attributes?
