Qualcomm's Butterfly Wing Display Gets Nearer 168
holy_calamity writes "Technology Review has an update on a screen technology from Qualcomm called Mirasol that delivers LCD-like colors and video but sips power like e-ink. Demonstration Android tablets with 5.7 inch Mirasol displays apparently held up well in bright light and were responsive enough for gaming. Qualcomm are in the process of building a $1 billion new factory to make the screens, which should appear in devices from phone and tablet makers next year."
Soon (Score:5, Insightful)
Between this and a couple of other low power passive displays working their way to market, one of them is going to succeed. And change everything.
The display is one of the biggest power hogs right now. The radios in cell phones are also pretty hungry but having an always on display will be game changing. Then when you consider the work on various memory techs that eliminate idle current and the lifetime issues with flash, things are going to continue to be very interesting in the tech world.
Backlight (Score:3, Insightful)
Am I the only one who wants backlight in his tablet? E-Ink is all nice and good, but its stupid to have to turn the lights on to read from an electronic device...
Re:Soon (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Disruptive (Score:5, Insightful)
Considering the vast majority of people are perfectly happy with 1920x1080 on a 50" screen, I doubt people will really care much if their 10" screen is any higher than that.
The BIGGEST complaint/problem with smartphones today is the lower battery life. If I could choose between doubling the resolution on my phone and doubling the battery life, I would choose the battery life in a heartbeat.
Re:Backlight (Score:5, Insightful)
Is it stupid to have to turn a light on to see at all?
You'd normally need a light to read a real book anyways, how is needing a light to read something on a different surface any different?
Maybe you like having tons of photons projected directly into your eyes, when your pupils are mostly dilated to accommodate reflect the total amount of light visible to you (which actually doesn't tend to average to much if the room is otherwise too dark to be able to read anything that isn't actually glowing, so your pupils are generally more dilated than they might need to be), but not everybody likes trying to read while staring into a flashlight.
Too little too late (Score:5, Insightful)
We've been hearing about this technology for years now, and unfortunately it's taken it so long to get to market that I think they've missed their market window.
Smartphones and tablets, spurred on in large part by Apple, have entered into an arms race of display quality with consumer displays the likes has never been seen before. The sort of displays our mobile devices have make our computer monitors look shameful, with AMOLED pushing the boundaries in terms of true blacks and contrast ratios and viewing angles, and ever-higher resolutions pushing DPIs to the boundaries of human sight. Most LCD IPS displays, which are the cream of the crop for desktop monitors and better than any flat-screen TV, are really just average at best these days in the mobile world.
The Mirasol displays, at least the ones that have been demoed, have never been the highest quality displays. Their two huge advantages are daylight-readability and low power-consumption. Those are two very positive traits, but at this stage, I don't really foresee anything outside of a niche market giving up ordinary-circumstance display quality for these.
Re:The diference being (Score:5, Insightful)
That's what makes them far more dangerous.
Top 3 ... (Score:4, Insightful)
1. An Electrical Engineer with a software patch.
2. A Programmer with a soldering iron.
3. A user with an idea.