No one is going to sell a device that costs significantly more than any other for the same power to provide what 99% of users would consider a sub par/ unusable display.
Like seriously can you imagine trying to sell a laptop that is unable to watch any media, play any games and has the refresh rate / perceived performance of a 15 year old tablet.
This stuff isn't ready to be a 'main' display yet.
> imagine trying to sell a laptop that is unable to - watch any kind of media - looks 'laggy'
Imagine thinking that the consumer market is only for media consumers. There is a whole market of enterprise products out there, and there is certainly a use case for a _work_ laptop which needs no multimedia support.
I wouldn't argue that someone buying this machine would only use only this machine. But I know I am not alone in saying that this would be my daily driver when focus is required.
> There is a whole market of enterprise products out there, and there is certainly a use case for a _work_ laptop which needs no multimedia support.
You think in 2021, when I'd argue the majority of folks that own a laptop are working remote, there's huge demand for a laptop that can't display a video feed from a zoom or WebEx meeting? That sounds extremely unlikely to me. I'd wager the demand for such a device would measure in the thousands and would never be cheap enough to sell more than a couple hundred.
You'd be far, far better off just making a Bluetooth keyboard case (like the old clamcase or brydge cases) for a boox and calling it good. You'd have an ssh terminal and basic office apps as supported by Android.
Actually, those displays do. They may work fairly well for the purpose. When I tested those capabilities years ago, the chief issue was with ghosting; the second with choosing either high definition with strong artefacts or fast, cleaner low definition; the third was with having algorithms that minimize dot switching (which is energy costly). But there is a possibility that newer refresh algorithms fixed most of that.
Even at the state of a few years ago, to just see talking heads and presentations the video capabilities of EPD were already more than adequate. It makes little sense energy wise (wrong instrument), but it is doable. Those who want the EPD properties for production may see little loss in the lower video quality - provided the issues I listed above have been mitigated, foremostly the ghosting.
I'm as much of a fan of the potentials of this technology as anyone, but it really look like it's terrible to use as a main display even for non-multimedia applications.
I.e. try setting your mouse or keyboard to have even 50-100ms of lag, a lot of people would find that very distracting to use even for just using a terminal Emacs/Vim & for writing plain-text.
There's a reason these things are being marketed as "secondary displays", which makes perfect sense.
In terms of cost I really don't see why anyone would want to do it differently anyway. A 20" LCD is dirt-cheap these days, so if you're already spending 5x or 10x that on the same size of E-Ink display why not get both?
While the 20ms latency on the Remarkable 2 is very impressive, let's please not say that users "cannot perceive the difference". At best the latency "does not bother" users. There are whole swaths of professions for which 20ms is a huge amount (professional gamers, musicians, etc), and even personally (And I generally view my lag perception as quite poor) the 20ms on the remarkable was noticeable enough that it did not feel as nice as having a good pen on paper.
Apple pushed an update in iOS 13 which brings the latency on the Pencil down to 9ms.
Which I remember vividly because it's when latency on the Pencil subjectively "went away" for me. Especially for tight loops in cursive, on iOS 12 the line would 'catch up' with the stylus, but at 9ms I don't perceive that.
Edit: crosshatching is an even better example of a technique which feels completely different at 9ms rather than 20ms.
In addition to the videoconferencing others have brought up, pretty much every Fortune 500 out there has extensive training requirements for their laptop-using employees - that content is a mix of video and slideshows. Those corps are the biggest purchasers of "work" laptops.
For the uninitiated, the training I'm referring to covers everything from sexual harassment to infosec to insider trading to "why you don't really need unions".
The only time I’ve “needed” to watch video at work has been for cheesy, anti-harassment training showing pre-recorded situations that are obviously illegal.
The other cases are videoconferencing, where someone is basically showing a fairly static powerpoint, sprint planning board, or other, text-heavy content.
Basically every enterprise of a reasonable size is going to require their users to consume multimedia content of some sort - web calls, training materials etc.
If the crux is that even you, clearly a passionate eink advocate, wouldn't be able to use it as a sole device then that essentially makes the market tiny. In fact, a secondary eink display sounds like exactly what you need.
When the refresh is more capable it'll be more of an option, and I cannot wait for that to be the case. But it's just not feasible to sell a laptop with an eink display as yet.
This sounds more like a usecase for the Pixel Qi screens, transflective LCDs which are sunlight-readable but with normal refresh rates and which have a full-color backlit mode. Still not sure why the tech never took off...
No manager would consider signing off on devices that don't make their PowerPoint deck look great. Without the corporate or consumer market you're going to struggle to find revenue.
What if they made the display modular, so that you could swap it with a regular display for when you want to do gaming and other stuff like that?
I personally would buy an e-ink laptop, but then again I'm very much into e-ink, I have a Kindle and ReMarkable 2, years ago I also bought DPT-S1 but I returned it because it was too expensive.
Also colour e-ink displays have been getting better and better too! So I'm sure that in time, it'll be amazing!
Issues? Yes. HDMI does not allow for the touchscreen, and you may want that. And the hardware system must optimize battery life, which can be awful on the HDMI connection.
What you really want is an optimized data connection and screen mirroring to the tablet.
Or, an EPD tablet with the ability to use more than Android...
Mind you, Android can be pretty effective on the tablet for some tasks. But when you will want to use a complete Office Automation suite, instead of the more toyish mobile alternatives...
What I finally did, this June, was: I coded my own word processor for Android.
A dual boot system (Android vs Linux Desktop) would be the best solution.
I used to run a full Debian chroot on Android. It was very handy except that if you ran it on an unrooted Android device you couldn't be a user with full root capabilities. But gcc, make, tar, gzip, and git worked well enough to compile working stacks for other languages (the first software I built on it was Perl from source) as a regular user. Thousands of packages available and the ability to build from source, right on my phone in my pocket. They had other distros for it, too. Unfortunately that project - GNURoot - seems abandoned. Possibly fortunately a new one is from the same maintainers. I think I never used X on it. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=tech.ula&hl=en...
There's another called Debian noroot (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.cuntubuntu...) that appears fairly up to date but I haven't tried it. It's well rated but said to be slow. It includes XFCE and apparently starts it by default. It uses PRoot.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=studio.com.tec... is yet another, and also uses PRoot. I have concerns about their page saying they have closed-source modded versions of F/OSS operating system distros though, and that they'll only provide source to developers who register with them. That's kind of unneighborly if they're customizing BSD or Apache licensed portions of a distro and illegal if they're doing it with GPL or LGPL portions.
I'm idly curious about the word processor you put together. You're not saying "text editor", which suggests some level of interesting/novel functionality.
Exactly: full fledged Word Processor, optimized for the contextual technology of a ~13'' EPD display (so, for example, no scrolling, corner-to-corner (but the margins) use of the display in two columns landscape - for use with a slotted BT keyboard). Native Java for Android (no need for NDK). Rich text and full paragraph justification, spacing and indenting - from scratch: text is rendered and placed on the bitmap of the screen canvas bit by bit whenever necessary upon editing. Functions through touchscreen and keyboard shortcuts. I structured a markup (using both paragraph styles and ad-hoc "direct formatting" - bold, italics etc.) which allows for simplicity and comfort in file manipulation, but the translation to .fodt (or .xml in general) is almost trivial (there are libraries around to manage typical formats: I have checked but not implemented as for personal use I do not really need the feature). Battery wise, I managed to remain very conservative: sometimes even 2%/hour (~100mA, equivalent to many days of work) of consumption (fortunately, also the use of BT keyboards consume very little).
It was started this June (2021), and I have used it for many hundred of hours with good productivity. I have not published it (yet) as I would want to polish the code first. It was quite rewarding to get it done (the best tailored product is the one you develop for yourself) - but still with a sensation of quite absurd oddity, since I had been using full-fledged word processors in the early nineties, and "there I was", almost thirty years later, with tablets much more powerful than the desktops of yore, coding a word processor because all was available for Android was unfit for use if compared to desktop tools, and I was just losing time waiting for "the product"... It's not "normal".
I hadn't thought of the concept of writing into a multiple-column layout before. That's really really neat. It keeps the individual runs of text short (faster for proofreading, I've heard), scrolls less, and lets you keep more context on the screen.
I'm definitely very interested in this when it comes out, I don't currently have a tablet-size device but that probably won't be the case for too long and I can see myself giving this a go. A single-column option for phones (in landscape mode) might be practical.
I do completely agree that Android feels structurally broken (for want of a better way to put it) in terms of application support - it honestly feels like someone figured out how to bolt WebKit onto a feature phone and add capacitive touch and eye candy, while (somehow???) maintaining the same "smol device" fundamentals of "toy" and "not full PC". IMHO the PC experience isn't really one single cohesive vision, but rather the emergent result of years of many thousands of little independently-evolved self-sustaining threads and ideas (particularly in UX design) intersecting and bouncing off each other in a sort of cohesive balance that resulted in (comparative) miracles like Windows XP. Microsoft et al didn't invent the fundamentals of the ideology and language that emerged; rather, they just figured out how to capitalize on the net result and realized that if they knee-capped it too heavily they'd kill the thing they were trying to benefit off of.
From a distance it kinda looks like Apple/Google are trying to (re)invent everything - conventions, expectations, design language, (tens of?) thousands of tiny details, etc - from first principles, without giving sufficient consideration to whether their fussing about accidentally edits and rewrites the technological aspects of the goal narrative. I think advertising and the exponential over-valuation of user data are to blame for the current insanity - and sadly so, since it's obvious that won't change soon. I think the fundamental incentive to refine and optimize for technical experience/competence has become diluted by All The Ad Revenue™ from the current status quo, producing the current ecosystem, app store offerings, app quality level, fragmentation, etc. Basically everything seems to be working as intended, or in other words I don't mean that "current status quo is fundamentally bad and evil" (for want of a better way to put it), I rather mean that between ad revenue, internal politicking, Google/Apple/Microsoft competition, antitrust regulations, overall public perception of how invasive ads/tracking is, etc etc, the system as a whole has basically reached a steady state that simply doesn't have room for pure technical excellence, which I don't think will change until the ad bubble collapses. I'm tentatively hopeful that might actually happen in my lifetime, although as a counterpoint, hopefully it doesn't take so long the world ends up in a WALL•E-style dystopia with everything paperclip-maximized around ads instead of garbage. Haha.
However, this all provides a unique opportunity for anyone prepared to make the effort to make apps that are actually interesting: can I interest you in a "Buy" button? :P
You mentioned cleaning up the source code - and while I certainly won't dissuade you from open-sourcing something like this :D (it would be a genuine net improvement, and you could list on F-Droid as well), I'm reminded of the "source code is <license> on GitHub, but ready-to-go APK in Play Store is $.$$" model, which I think could work quite well for this sort of thing. There are a lot of small, focused apps out there that have loyal followings.
Maybe you could do an "early beta" sort of thing to cue users to understand the first versions are free but you plan to change that at some point. (The Play Store management dashboards probably make it straightforward to grandfather everyone who started with the beta into free updates for life or something like that.)
I was wondering if you can freely customize the system (install software like a normal Linux Desktop OS) and checked, and I found a curious detail ( https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/PineNote ):
> NPU (Neural Processing Unit) Capabilities: * Neural network acceleration engine with processing performance of up to 0.8 TOPS; * Supports integer 8 and integer 16 convolution operations; * Supports the following deep learning frameworks: TensorFlow, TF-lite, Pytorch, Caffe, ONNX, MXNet, Keras, Darknet
So... An eInk laptop wouldn't be for media. It'd be a different product with different pros/cons. Easier on the eyes. Better in sunlight. Easier on battery. Quite usable for reading, emails, code and any "mostly text" use.
To the OP's original point "why doesn't this just exist..." IMO, it could, but it would need to be a different product class. Just sticking the monitor onto a windows machine isn't good enough. It needs its apps/etc. The market is probably much smaller than the phone/tablet and laptop/desktop markets. Perhaps potential vendors don't think it's big enough to support the necessary OS, apps & such.
Amazon sees the same potential - and risk - and has been quietly iterating for over a decade in the segment.
If you want to go seriously explore it as a product, I’d start with a deep dive study there and develop a few theories how you think you could be different enough to blow it wide open.
> Like seriously can you imagine trying to sell a laptop that is unable to watch any media, play any games and has the refresh rate / perceived performance of a 15 year old tablet.
In a word: yes. But I was 10 or 11 years old before we had a color TV.
Yeah, a lot of negative comments, from people coming up with all sorts of multimedia use cases, when there is clearly a market gap and plenty of people that want work houses without multimedia capability.
I doubt an lcd display in a laptop costs a vendor more than $10. So that would make it a 16 million dollar company. If a E-Ink display costs $100, it would still only be a 160 million dollar company...
a good display is several hundred dollars.
Market valuation does not equal to annual sales.
A niche notebook like this can be sold at higher premium.
The idea would be to offer notebook not the display.
Like seriously can you imagine trying to sell a laptop that is unable to watch any media, play any games and has the refresh rate / perceived performance of a 15 year old tablet.
This stuff isn't ready to be a 'main' display yet.