I was thinking of putting together a little "Anki" device for my kid using such a device. Anyone have any other ideas for a small eInk device that is programmable like this?
I can tell you this conversation happened over a decade ago because LCD Touchscreens were still more expensive than e-ink at the time.
Why keep it simple when you can massively over engineer it ;)
I think there's something to be said about not carrying a phone-like device into stores, since the whole "cameras everywhere" situation is feeling more dystopian than it already did. I even carried paper lists to not further contribute to that.
In normal operation battery life is by how often you do a refresh, the rest of the time it's in deep sleep. I think for this application I could build in a refresh schedule tied to when the house is active (mornings, evenings, weekends) to reduce the number of refreshes. It syncs on touch if it hasn't synced in the last 5 minutes (and there's a button for when your feeling impatient)
A few have tried to compete over the years, none have really managed to ramp up production and compete from my understanding. I believe there are some chinese firms making smaller panels now, mainly used in electronic shelf labels for stores.
From my understanding most of the patents for the foundational tech have expired at this point. I believe the panels are just generally very difficult to make, with difficulty ramping up further as panel size goes up, presumably the yield is fairly low.
Competition explores completely different technologies: Daylight DC-1, Reinkstone, ChLCD e.g. from Iris... but either the tech isn't good enough to generalize or be cheap (the later), or the niche economics don't allow the inventors to keep investing (the two first).