Some years ago there was this „paperlike kindle“ that was advertised with: „you can read it in bright daylight!“ and then we never heard about this invention again.
Edit: thanks for your input. I think I understand now.
In: Technology
The Kindle screen uses a technology called “e-ink”. This works by, instead of having electronic pixels, you use tiny little liquid filled beads with dark suspended pigment particles in them. If you apply an electric charge to the pixel grid, you can make those suspended particles move away from the screen, making it look bright, or move towards the screen, making it look dark.
This technology has several advantages, as you mentioned they are readable in bright daylight, because they work basically exactly the same as ink on paper, meaning the reflected glar doesn’t wash out the light produced by the screen. Other advantages are that this display technology is entirely passive if the screen isn’t changing, so it uses no power at all unless you change something, which of course makes it great for e-readers, where the screen rarely changes.
However it comes with some very significant drawbacks. Since you have to wait for the physical pigment particles to move around, changing a pixel takes very long compared to normal screens, leading to very low maximum refresh rates (typically no more than a few Hz, for comparison most phones nowaday run at least 60 Hz screens, and 24Hz is the absolute minimum if you want to be able to watch a video without visible stuttering, more if you want to view rendered content like video games). Since you’re working with these black pigment particles it also (E: usually, but not always) limits you to a black and white (or, at best, grayscale) display, and these two major drawbacks make the tech effectively useless for smartphones or tablets.
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