E-ink Screen for Fairphone 4 or future versions

Would be awesome if Fairphone 4 had an option for E-ink displays.
Fairphone with e/OS (de-googled Android) and E-ink display will be perfect for my usecase.
It would even be okay, if they just partner with a E-ink manufacturer and we can buy the display directly from the manufacturer.
It would make Fairphone even more of a unique product and there is a potential for productivity focused Custom ROMs etc. in the future.

9 Likes

E-ink is patented and therefore super expensive. It also does not show color (unless you are into comic books with expensive e-reader) and very low refresh rate.

2 Likes

I don’t know about that, it seems the displays could be getting towards daily driver usability, prices seem reasonable, but this display option could use more vendors doing phones with it … or a display module …

Here’s some price.

6 Likes

Yeah, I saw that announcement of such a smartphone (diff version tho but still). I was excited. Not because I’d buy it, but because I also (like topic starter) like such innovations and see the benefit of it. Still, the colors are very bland. Nowadays it contains an old SoC already, too.

There’s a bunch of other e-ink smartphones by Hisense HN Search powered by Algolia

I wouldn’t trust that brand, like Xiaomi and Huawei and these other state-owned companies, but unfortunately I am unable to cite a source for Hisense. Plus, Chinese companies never care for patents… so you obviously, if they’re going to include e-ink in a smartphone, you cannot compare the price with a proper device in EU or US.

3 Likes

It will still be good for people who want to reduce smartphone usage but can’t go back to dumbphones (because lack of banking apps and whatnot).
E-ink will in a way ‘disable’ the most addictive aspects of a smartphone, videos and games.
Will be very helpful for people with ADHD and attention problems.

yeah. I know about Hisense, but they come with a Chinese OS with probably lots of ad trackers etc and they do not have custom ROMs either.
Fairphone 4 already has custom ROM such as the e/OS and it being modular makes it a great candidate for having an E-ink screen.

3 Likes

How so?
As it seems latest generation E-Ink displays enable at least casual gaming and video watching already, and the technology will not get worse in the future.
Anyway, users prioritising these use cases would not buy an E-Ink display which would somehow disable this or make it hard.

And I would think a constant stream of notifications and messages would play an at least important role in addiction, too, and E-Ink can’t do much about what users choose to expose themselves to in this regard.

It’s very easy on the eyes and can be an extreme battery saver … enough pros for me.

3 Likes

E-ink is great for reading, but not for scrolling (too low refresh rate, you actually want more than 60 Hz if you scroll a lot). It would require e.g. a browser and a user to take that into account. E-readers already have support for reading more than books, such as articles via e.g. pocket.

As for notifications, you can just disable them all, but the all or nothing approach sucks. There’s launchers which are more friendly for the user, such as Ratio. I think that launcher would be (near) perfect for e-ink.

2 Likes

That used to be the case, but there are options for faster display (though with more ghosting, less colors and even some blurring) like shown in the videoreview. If you look at e-ink reviews there are two techniques, quite slow but also another way (see for example the video of Good E-reader here: Reinkstone R1 DES Slurry vs E INK Kaleido Plus - YouTube) which can refresh way faster (will still not be anything near lcd though). Woops, seems it’s not how I remembered, more the other way around.
So basic games with not too much changes in the screen would be no problem (will have ghosting, how much depends on the quality setting), video’s a bit more.
I only play an occasional game like Free-shizen or Kingdom, which wouldn’t be a problem (apart from reduced color detail in Kingdom). But for reading lots of texts (digital newspaper, Correspondent (online dutch journal) and e-books I’m already a bit tempted to buy a HiSense. But having a FP3 with /e/os it would be an adiitional device, off course. If you could swap the display, for example when on holiday, that would be great, with even a big chance I would mostly use de e-color display (for work and some hobbies I’m mostly not far from laptop or desktop anyway, so I’ll just watch video’s on the bigger screen).

1 Like

should be so cool to have a e ink display on Fairphone 2, 3 and 4 ! what a win of battery… That’s probably the futur, and make fairphone as the first of low consumption phone !

I get that an e-ink main screen is probably too niche to be worth the trouble, but what about a smartphone case with e-ink display ?

This one is for the iphone :
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/450819344/inkcase-i7-plus-dual-screen-for-iphone-7-plus

It would be interesting to test one, but everything is sold out on Oaxis’ website (except the regular cases without e-ink screen). Furthermore, they haven’t made any case for iphones newer than model 8. And it seems to be difficult/impossible to find one second hand. I found the ivy model on a website, but not the full screen model.
To sum up: I doubt that it went well for oaxis’ inkcase.

E-paper would be GREAT!

Hi there,

I’ve just got that idea, and apparenly it exist on the chinese market, with hisens (link in french)

I would really love to get one of that screen for my FP3! And i think it is really the kind of ecological way where FairPhone has to go! This is using way less battery power and eyes!

Just wanted to share it! Expect there will be some reflections about it!

This has been discussed multiple times, so it has been more convenient to move it here.

You can find more by searching. If a topic is closed ask for it to be opened etc.
https://forum.fairphone.com/search?q=e%20ink

e.g.

or

3 Likes

I’m buying the hisense a5 pro cc (colour eink kaleido 1 screen?) because oled eye strain is getting too much for me and i think it’ll actually do the job for most things. However I will have to do a bunch of funky things to remove the chinese trackers and be able to install google apps, etc. Also, it’s more than 2 years old and feels like still the best on the market.

I would absolutely love to have a fairphone with optional modular kaleido 3 or gallery screen. The two E-ink technologies has come a long way in the last few years and I think it’s now feasible for a phone. The eink tablet market has been exploding.

I feel like we are suffering so much blue light pollution that is affecting our circadian rythyms that is so hard to avoid. I feel bad for kids and teenagers in their developmental years. It’s just so hard to avoid, we do everything on phones and laptops now, banking, calendars, mail, this could really have an impact.

Fairphone seems to care about keeping the os ass open as possible and also meeting a good standard of performance. It seems like the ideal platform for fairphone or an eink company to make an optional or replacement screen for.

I wonder how difficult it is to make the adjustments to the OS and make a screen that will be compatible? Obviously this wouldn’t be desired by everyone but could it be commercially viable with enough demand…

This has been brought up over the years when technology wasn’t so good:

And even in 2015

this component would be a gamechanger