I'm considering an E ink phone, like the Mudita Pure. Does any one have experience with an E ink mobile device? What are your thoughts? Pros? Cons?
Alec of the YouTube channel Technology Connections has a video[1] about his experience with an E-Ink device on his second channel. He wanted to see if this would improve his productivity, so it's not exactly the same as your question, but it's still worth a watch, imho.
I have an E-ink tablet, Boox Note Air. Some thoughts:
- Screen must be backlit. E-ink screens look great in perfect sunlight and fluorescent lights , but if you're used to a phone/tablet, you'd be surprised how dim e-ink can look just sitting on a couch in the evening, with a lamp a few meters away. Backlighting fixes that.
- Web browsing on e-ink is not bad at all if you stick to text-heavy stuff. The low refresh rate actually discourages "endless scroll" behaviour. Get a browser like Kiwi that allows you to set the Vol. keys as PgUp/PgDn. That makes the lag a lot less perceptible.
Great battery life, light.Great for ebooks. I wish there was a laptop option as well, like HP's old Omnibook. Color is not required for many applications.
I use the LightPhone. IMO, eInk takes things maybe a bit too far. The refresh rate is terrible and I have yet to seen an eInk phone that has a good texting experience. Most of the companies doing this are trying to get people off their smartphones (a goal I agree with). But making texting harder ironically leads to me using the phone longer than I would if I had an easy way to send a text.
The battery life and visibility in the sun are both great features. I'm hoping the middle part of the spectrum between the eInk phones and the iPhone/Pixel starts to fill in. Something more along the lines of the Wise Phone (https://techless.com/).
E-ink is excellent for daylight use. I still have some issue with diffuse overhead lighting (e.g., fluorescent lighting). Detail is high, battery usage is generally low. Frontlight gives excellent indoor / dark ambient legibility.
The way I describe it: persistence is free, pixels are cheap, paints are slow, colour is (mostly) nonexistent. I find the interface far less distracting than emissive displays.
My own leaning is toward the dumbest phone I can find (though an e-ink display would be excellent), an e-book tablet, and a good laptop. Tablets are excellent for reading in ways that neither a smaller phone nor landscape laptop are.
I use a Hisense A5 since about two years and the battery runtime of over a week is just excellent. Being able to use it in plain sunlight is simply priceless. The grayscale display is good enough and i don't miss color at all. The only thing that somewhat bothers me is that it can't be equipped with some non-chinese alternate ROM like LineageOS. Nonetheless, as it turned out to be much better than expected i actually bought a second unit as a spare.
What are you using it for?
I use a normal Android phone and a phone sized Android e-reader. IMO, doing anything beyond reading long form material on an Android eink device is too painful to replace a phone because most apps have animations and lots of color.
I don't see the attraction of the Mudita Pure (other than a very nice aesthetic). It just seems like a (hugely) overpriced Nokia feature phone.
I'd like an e-ink 'monitor' that I can plug into my iphone and clip on the back of the device and have the same content displayed there as on the phone! best of both worlds!
I really would like that for the map on my bike.
HiSense A5 is a dual-screen, something to consider.
I live in places where the sun always shines; it's almost impossible to work normally outside (which is my preferred office) without eInk. I wish there were more laptops because it works fine for coding (I have Boox devices which I use sometimes to write code). Phone same thing. Of course with the great extra of having very long battery life.
My wife writes/reads books on eInk devices and I do reading, browsing and shell/coding. It works really well.