This Phone is The First 3G Smartphone With an E-ink Screen And Allegedly Will Cost Peanuts!

It takes a lot to stand out at a trade show the size of Mobile World Congress. But here’s one device that caught my eye today: an e-ink smartphone. Unlike Yota Phone, the Russian startup that’s using e-ink as a second screen to augment the back of a powerful high end smartphone in a bid to stand out in the uber crowded Android space, this prototype device has just the one screen. A single e-ink screen on the front of the device — so it’s a true e-ink phone.

It’s also a true smartphone. There were two prototypes on show at Eink‘s stand, both with a 1GHz chip inside and one (the white one) with a 3G chip in it. The other had Edge connectivity. The phones run Android but, as you’d expect, the OS has been simplified with a custom UI that strips back the functionality to focus on the applications that make sense for a fully e-ink smartphone — such as a reader app, a dialer and email. The UI also includes a web browser since certain types of webpages can be viewed on an e-ink screen. It won’t support video of course but text-based sites can still be read.

The black prototype device (pictured below) also includes a backlight for reading in the dark. Both screens are capacitive, but as you’d expect with e-ink the refresh rate can be a little slow. Ghosting on the screen from past renders can be removed by shaking the device. The technology can support both portrait and landscape orientation so the e-ink smartphone could be turned on its side to switch the orientation to more of an e-reader sized width. Both devices felt incredibly lightweight.

Why do you want an only e-ink phone? Price for one thing. Battery life for another. Not to mention visibility in bright sunlight. Put all those factors together and this could be the perfect device for some emerging markets where electricity is at a premium. The prototypes are proof of concept at this point but Giovanni Mancini, director of product management for E-ink — the company which makes the screen — said the Chinese OEM which has made the prototypes, Fndroid, is talking to telcos and could launch a device this year.

So how much would this e-ink smartphone cost? Mancini said the device maker would set the price but in his view it would be comparable with a feature phone price tag. A big theme of this year’s MWC has been smaller mobile players — from open source OSes like Firefox that are seeking to drive openness and accessibility and drive down the cost of devices, to mobile veterans like Nokia focusing afresh on building smarter feature phones to target cost-conscious users in emerging markets. So it’s interesting to see companies toying with the idea of an entirely e-ink smartphone to cut device costs while preserving key smartphone functions such as access to the internet and email. [TechCrunch]

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Quantum Physics Are Powering The New 4K Sony TV

While Sony might currently be spoken about in TV circles for its blazing 4K sets, the future could hold something quite different. In fact, Sony's Next Big Thing—Triluminous displays—will be powered by quantum physics.

The new range of TVs will be the first consumer devices to make use of quantum dots: a previously lab-based semiconductor technology, which uses "tuned" nanocrystals so small—around 10 nano­metres in diameter— that they exhibit quantum properties. As a result, they emit light at highly specific and predetermined wavelengths, allowing them to offer a 50 percent increase in the range of colors that screens can produce.

It's that promise which has Sony excited over the technology. But what's different about the new sets, other than a bunch of tiny dots? Nature explains:

"The contrast with today's flat screens begins with the light source. Conventional LCDs use a high-intensity blue LED backlight whose glow is converted by a phosphor coating to create a broadband, white light used to make the moving TV images. The new Triluminos tele­visions instead pair an uncoated blue LED with a thin glass tube filled with quantum dots. Two kinds of quantum dots in the tube absorb some of the blue light from the backlight and re-emit it as pure red and green light. The resulting white light is more intense at the wavelengths of these three specific colours than the white light made by a phosphor-coated LED, so that more colour comes through in the images."

While pushing the bounds of technological capability with cutting edge science is something we heartily support, it remains to be seen how the use of quantum dots will directly benefit consumers. These TVs may offer up improvements that the everyday viewer doesn't really appreciate—but we'll have to wait and see how the sets perform in real life before we know what they can truly offer. Unsurprisingly, there's no timeline for the release of the Triluminous displays. [Engadget]

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Microsoft Patch Vulnerability That Targets Old Versions of IE

Microsoft is today resolving a nasty vulnerability that targets old versions of Internet Explorer and allowed a user's PC to be overtaken if the browser was steered to select malicious websites. After it was initially found last month, Microsoft offered up a few workarounds and a standalone patch to avoid the flaw, which threatens versions 6, 7, and 8 of Internet Explorer. 

                                                  Customers Prefer Tablets Over PC's

But today's security update should eliminate the vulnerability for good. Microsoft says that to date, just a "limited number" of customers have fallen victim to the zero-day exploit, but admits " the potential exists that more customers could be affected in the future." As such, the update has been designated critical and will be automatically installed for users that have enabled Automatic Updates on their PCs. Of course, this is also another reminder to keep your browser updated — assuming your situation permits it. IE 9 and 10 were protected from this particular vulnerability from the very beginning. [TheVerge]

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