[Quoth]

Originally Posted by elinkser

Wow, that was news to me, that there was such a Russian phone.
And here it is:

https://www.cnet.com/reviews/yotaphone-2-review/

Sounds like just the kind of thing I would have drooled over, but at 860 $US, it would have been from afar.

I remember it. The only real value of the eink was to keep displaying a map or text whenthe battery went flat.

Back in 2007 or 2008 Philips did a folding eink only phone. Sort of rolled up. So was too fat for a pocket! They sold that division and the eventual owner buried it.

I designed a clamshell eink 4G VOIP phone in 2007 that was never made. I thought a clamshell was better to protect the screen. So the idea of the Danger Phone phone and Motorola Flip combined with eink. It was also partly inspired by the Nokia Communicator I had in 2001.

Remember MS bought a phone company and killed it before Nokia's phone division?
Microsoft bought Danger Inc. in Sept. 2008 for $500 million.

I think a better idea than the Blackberry format.

In the end Qualcom bought the 4G company Flarion and buried it, so our 4G before LTE as alternate to Wimax died.

It turned out that eink isn't very good even for typing text. It's best for reading whole pages. You can't sensibly update per pixel, Entire blocks have to be reset and redrawn.