This NFC-Powered Bonus E-Ink Display For Your Phone Needs No Batteries

This NFC-Powered Bonus E-Ink Display For Your Phone Needs No Batteries


No matter what you’re doing at a computer, two displays are always better than one, and that could soon be true for your mobile devices as well. Prototypes of dual-display smartphones have already been demonstrated, but researchers have now revealed a wireless second display for your mobile devices that magically sucks the minimal power it requires from a wireless NFC connection.

Teams from Intel, the University of Washington and the University of Massachusetts developed the e-ink based secondary display that can not only download text and images from a phone’s wireless NFC connection, but also steal the minimal power it needs to update its own display in the process.

The second display’s e-ink screen is what makes this whole approach possible, since it only needs power when it’s updating what’s on screen. So the downside is that you’re stuck with static black and white images on the second display. But if you needed to keep an address or phone number handy, or a screenshot of a map, it allows you to do so without leaving your smartphone’s battery-draining LCD powered on. [YouTube via Pocket-lint via liliputing]


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