I'm submitting this mostly as a curiosity, but I'm sorry, this product is deprecated due to Pixel Qi closing shop. I wonder why this projects never take off, while I see plenty of people interested in an outdoors-capable laptop.
It seems that there's still some movement in the transflective screen space, but always in other devices.
If someone here in HN has the money and the willpower to do it, it would be more than enough to provide screen replacements for thinkpads and other popular laptops IMO.
I currently do some work in the outdoors. I love to somewhere surrounded by nature, open my laptop and use my phone as hotspot, but I feel the fatigue after some time.
Hi, I and many others share your desire to work outside and not feel fatigued after working with a digital device.
Making a quality transflective screen suitable for laptops and having good viewing angles is a complex manufacturing process; companies are working on it. I hope in the future this becomes viable.
At EI2030, we are working on making an open-source and open-hardware e-ink laptop and tackling the challenges. Our first pre-prototype Archer is almost complete, and we are going to start working on our second prototype.
> I love to somewhere surrounded by nature, open my laptop and use my phone as hotspot, but I feel the fatigue after some time…
I think this has more value than just working somewhere in the arms of nature. The fact that we no longer see sunsets as often as we should and with mobile phones and modern IPS panel screens constantly feeding daylight (morninglight) spectrum through our eyes into our brains, we stifle our body clock [1] too easily.
A screen that works outside of the covered space or even in the sunroom of my house would mean a lot. It will offer better sleep patterns than today.
I have an old Acer Aspire One netbook which I modded with a Pixel Qi display. It is definitely usable for programming in direct sunlight, though the display is physically too small to get comfortable doing a lot of programming on it. Funnily enough, the major problem is not enough sunlight -- indoors, you can use the backlight, and direct sun provides a good contrast ratio outside, but in the shade outdoors, particularly after my eyes have adjusted for sunlight, the screen becomes difficult to see.
Just the Pixel Qi. In indirect light, the contrast ratio is much lower than, say, a Kindle, which is itself much lower than paper. So unless the sun is directly on it, it's harder for sun-adjusted eyes to read than a Kindle, or than it is for indoors-adjusted eyes to read a normal backlit LCD.
I'd really really love a Qi or even better, an eInk laptop. Black and white would be fine. Colour eInk has too bad refresh rates anyway(or useless colours with LCD overlay like eInk Kaleido) For text terminal work it would be fine and the laptop could be really low spec (think raspberry pi kind of specs)
I live in Spain and it would be really nice being able to do some light work outside in the sun. You can do it with some regular laptops (especially with HDR displays) but it will kill battery life and you'll still end up squinting. It's really sad that PixelQi went out of business.
Close yeah but not really comfortable on the lap or anything.
I always hated the Surface Pro style tablets. Or those Apple keyboards for the iPad. I've tried them but sold them again, they were a horribly unstable contraption.
For me a laptop has the keyboard firmly attached to the screen at all times :) Especially for portable use.
Instead, get a Yogabook C930 with a dual display eInk + color, and touch + pen support on both screens. Great for notetaking in portrait mode: looks like a book, you write with the pen on the eink side while reading PDF or websites on the other side. Smaller than a macbook air or an ipad. Feels lighter too when held like a book in portrait mode.
Better: Fold over to use eink as the main display in mirror mode after updating the drivers. This suspend the color display to save battery. Ideal with a bluetooth or mechanical USBC keyboard: 2 USB-C ports for charging and connecting a peripheral at the same time.
> A touch keyboard is a no-go for me, sadly. Especially for this kind of usecase
Get a USBC mechanical keyboard if that's your thing ; an amd64 tablet with a eink display and enough ports to connect a mechanical keyboard is quite unique.
If you plan to use it as a "laptop", you are missing 95% of the usecase: it's for taking notes with the wacom pen (55% of my use) and using the eink screen as the main screen with a physical keyboard (40% of my use).
The remaining 5% is using the touch keyboard to type a login when I can't be bothered to grab my laptop in the next room
Oh I see they also made one with a real keyboard as recently as last year (thinkbook plus), wonder if the eink can be drawn via software directly (instead of using it as a regular display and let the driver guess how to optimize draw calls).
I have an OLPC I found on ebay- by sheer luck I managed to find an XO-4, the newer ARM-based model. It's a slow, humble machine, but it's rugged as hell, usable in sunlight, gets about 5 hours of battery life in realistic conditions, and doesn't have any trouble running vim, gcc, git, or ssh. I would never use it as my daily-driver, but it is a nice distraction-free way to do a little tinkering in the great outdoors. Would recommend.
Both companies typically launch new products with a kickstarter/promo on Indiegogo, to generate buzz, then sell through retail channels such as DroiX: https://droix.net/ and Ali Express.
Support is ... well, it's what you'd expect for a smallish Chinese company launching via a kickstarter. On the other hand, their machines are fairly well-designed and well-made (for products from a smallish Chinese etcetera): I'm currently running a One Netbook One Mix 4, a 10" ultrabook (quad-core i7, 16Gb RAM, 1Tb SSD) with about the same footprint as an old Asus Eeee PC 1000, but much much thinner, lighter, and more powerful -- it works fine.
GPD do an impressive line of pocketable x86 computers. Some of them have keyboards designed to be touch-typed on, though I can't comment on their ergonomics.
I can comment on the ergonomics of the GPD MicroPC, which I got a few days ago and have been using ever since: it's awesome. I can do about 50 wpm on the thumb keyboard, which I'm sure is as good as I ever got on those tiny EeePC keyboards. It's very satisfying to hold and use, and it comfortably supports a full Plasma desktop. Look no further for a pocket laptop.
I had a Samsung NC10, 10-inch, and touch-typed on it just fine. Perhaps 10" is larger than what some people mean by ‘netbook’, but it fit in a shoulder bag and weighed about 1.3 kg, so was pretty light. Guess Macbook Air and copycats snatched this form-factor, so they stopped being called ‘netbooks’.
Netbooks had one enormous advantage: they were cheap. That also means they are expendable. I used one (Acre Aspire One) as my mobile workhorse for quite some time and it never felt unusable. Of course, the tests an i5 runs in 30 seconds the Atom runs in 2 minutes, but you can spend that time thinking what to do next.
Now you can get a reasonable entry level laptop for more or less the same price, so, even if the name is no longer a thing, the product is still quite available.
The NC10 was a great device for its time -- lightweight, long battery life, nearly full size keyboard. I used it as my primary computing device for years, and would still be using it had it not suffered the pinched display cable problem, and I broke the hinge trying to fix it.
What killed the netbook was the ultrabook -- similar weight and battery life, but with a larger display and full size keyboard.
Like an iPad: read some web pages, mail, etc; a little light editing. But in a lightweight, long battery life with the benefits of a keyboard rather than the crappy virtual keyboard.
I used to have an Apple “MacBook” which at 2 lbs (900 g) was great for carrying around, flying all over the world, etc. As I develop in Emacs, development was great, though complication was slow; I’d often compile in the cloud. It was a great machine. I use an m1 air these days which is half a pound heavier and is a great development machine.
Despite what I said about crappy virtual keyboards I am typing this comment on about 450 g of ipad.
I’ve used a 12-inch MacBook for years as my daily driver for backend web development. It’s perfectly usable if you don’t run any Electron crap or Docker (on Linux it would actually be fine, but Docker for Mac is terrible) and the portability and battery life is amazing.
You'd be amazed. The screen is high-res, the touchpad is precise, and the keyboard is complete. You occasionally find key combos that are hard to type - switching VTs springs to mind - but otherwise, it's almost as usable as a full size laptop. I haven't tried it yet, but I think (light) coding on it would be quite practical.
Actually, let's try it:
#include <stdio.h>
int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
while(1) {
printf("All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy!\n");
}
}
IDK man, less than 13" is a struggle for me, specially outdoors. If you need to scroll, or change between stuff and such, I don't how such small device won't get in the way.
Really? I recall netbooks being pretty bad. Cramped keyboards, short battery life, weak processors... the worst of all worlds, really. What attracts you to them?
Not the parent, but back then they had longer battery life than conventional laptops, 93% size keyboard, were really cheap (great for me as a student) and were fine for browsing the net (for about a year, then the websites became suddenly a lot more complex) and remote work.
I remember trying to buy an eeePC in a computer store and when I said it is for programming the guy there didn't want to sell me one but tried to sell me a 17" monstrosity. But I needed it for travel and to do office and coding work and most of the time I used SSH to a more powerful PC anyway.
The only stupid thing was that Microsoft artificially limited netbooks to low resolution and low RAM. You could apparently either build a netbook, or a fully-featured laptop, but not a small-format laptop without getting some kind of license penalty. Same a couple of years later when Intel and MS mandated that Ultrabooks have glossy touchscreens and motion sensors and could be maxially X mm thick.
I'm writing novels outside in my spare time. Unfortunately, for people like me there are no reasonable options, especially since I need Windows (special software). The SunBook were too expensive to me (+tax and international delivery). I've given up by now and just buy the cheapest smallest laptop I can find, plus a power pack. It makes continuous backups so if it explodes in the sun I wouldn't lose too much work.
My EePC was better than what I have now, at least it had a matte screen and 12 hours battery life with a replacement battery, but unfortunately was stolen.
It says something about the laptop market that you have to buy a complete laptop when you just need a sunlight-proof display. With desktop computers, this would just be a monitor, because they're modular.
This is something that was impressed on me by the Hackintosh world— desktops are comparatively easy to build because you can always buy hardware that has preexistent drivers written. For laptops, everything is proprietary, often with only enough ACPI implemented to get Windows to boot. Usually discrete GPUs are disabled for reasons I never had need to remember, even when drivers otherwise exist.
I was one of the (probably few) suckers that bought an Adam tablet built around the promise of the Pixel Qi screens. It would replace e-readers (can read at the beach) and be a full-featured Android tablet. Unfortunately, while they did actually produce some of the devices and ship to early purchasers, they were plagued with delays, bugs and poor harware performance. They couldn't/wouldn't get authorization to use the Google Play Store, and so tried to produce their own with (I think) the goal of trying to be a mini-Apple (hardware/OS custom designed).
It also was produced right when Android 2.x was being phased on, Android 3 was not being adopted and Android 4+ was still around the corner.
Supposedly the company behind them, Notion Ink, produced a couple other devices despite such a horrific launch with the Adam, but I stopped paying attention as I would never send them another cent after my poor experience, which I chalk up to a learning experience on my part on who to trust with my money.
We had a customer who wanted to use a transfexive display. Huge project, some kind of outdoor advertizing in asia. We got prototypes from a major display manufacturer (can't say which but I think there are not so many) and well... it looked like they just took a normal LCD and left out the backlight. Readability and contrast was really bad in any light.
A trainee acidentially broke the display but he was lucky: the customer wasn't interested in it anymore after seeing a demo. I don't know what became of the project.
I don’t know about reliability and quality of the Pixel Qi screens, but the underlying technology worked—I saw it working on the OLPC, and it was great.
Sometimes it takes a few iterations to get the production process right. Maybe if Mary Lou Jensen’s reality distortion field had lasted a bit longer we would all have been better off.
I, for one, would buy one of these things in a minute if they were still available.
Which one? I saw XO and it was terrible. I am genuinely curious, did you actually use it actively? Because a lot of people take a quick look and then use their first impression. My meaning of terrible is that it was unusable compared to an equivalent LCD of the same price (I have to guess based on what I was told was the actual selling price of the overall product, about USD$250 in 2008 since OLPC was never transparent about their costs and Quanta holds such data tight). It had lower resolution. Lower brightness and color gamut in normal mode. Lower contrast in reflective mode.
> Mary Lou Jensen’s reality distortion field had lasted a bit longer we would all have been better off
I doubt it. btw, it is Jepsen, not Jensen. I work in the display industry. Most of the experts I talked to were surprised that anyone thought it would be successful. Which explains why the only investors were unsophisticated decision makers from UN. The millions wasted on it were taken from developing countries. That's a shame. Jepsen left the industry and now works on "practical telepathy". I think it is easier to shift the reality distortion field to a new set of victims than it is to actually make genuine improvements to a technology.
Yes, I did use the OLPC quite a bit. I was an active supporter of the project, so I bought a number of the devices when they were first made available to donors. I actually taught myself Python on the OLPC itself just so I could hack the software that came pre-installed on the device, and I volunteered a bunch of time debugging those programs.
The OLPC as a whole was a mixed bag; a successful experiment, I think, even if the project was a bit of a fiasco. The keyboard was trash, not just because of its size, but because the rubberized keys would frequently fail to capture key presses. The OS they released was buggy and poorly conceived in many ways. The OLPC was also released right before cheap netbooks and tablets hit the market, obviating the project's main value proposition.
But other things worked well, and the screen was one of them, at least for my purposes. I lived in Miami at the time, and it was only with the OLPC laptop that I was able to code while sitting out on my porch. I fixed the keyboard problem by plugging a mechanical keyboard into the USB port, and avoided the custom OS by dropping into the shell and telnetting into my workstation. Even with those awkward hacks, I still enjoyed coding on it because it let me do something I couldn't do otherwise.
The relative cost of the screen wasn't an issue for me. I would have paid quite a bit more than I did, just to have a working laptop (or even a terminal) that was usable in the bright sunlight. And buying an OLPC was meant to be more of a charitable gift anyway.
From your comments on Jepsen, it sounds to me like one of the challenges that Pixel Qi's technology faced was that it was promoted by the wrong messenger. Maybe you're right that there wouldn't have been a larger market for it, even if it had been rolled out with industry support as a commercial project instead of as part of an NGO. I don't know, though.
A screen that can be seen in the sun without a backlight draws less power, and most people use their mobile devices and laptops outside at least part of the time. Even with a full backlight, most screens today cannot be used in direct sunlight, and any outdoor use draws more power than indoor use, not less, which is the reverse of what it should be. I found the experience of using the OLPC screen perfect for what I wanted to do with it, and I think there would be a large enough niche to support reasonable unit economics if the product were marketed the right way to the right people.
Apologies for getting Jepsen's name wrong, by the way. Blame it on my typing out my first comment out on my phone.
Generally speaking, you can find plenty of daylight readable portables today: They're sold as "rugged" laptops, as they tend to be found in fleet vehicles.
It seems that there's still some movement in the transflective screen space, but always in other devices.
If someone here in HN has the money and the willpower to do it, it would be more than enough to provide screen replacements for thinkpads and other popular laptops IMO.
I currently do some work in the outdoors. I love to somewhere surrounded by nature, open my laptop and use my phone as hotspot, but I feel the fatigue after some time.
A transflective screen for my x260 could be a game changer. A color e-ink with a decent refresh rate too (although improbable, but there's a community trying to make it real https://forum.ei2030.org/t/proposal-ei-2030-the-community-bu...).
I've been looking for this kind of solutions for years, and it seems there's plenty of people looking for something similar too.