I love my Kindle, but mostly because of Amazon’s warranty. In five years of owning Kindles, I have broken three, all entirely because of user error that involved a sharp force to the unyielding e-ink display. A new tech from China promises to put a stop to all that.
A graphene-based e-ink from Guangzhou Technologies promises a screen that’s brighter, more flexible and by definition more resistant to abuse. Thanks to the cheaper material (carbon-based graphene is relatively inexpensive to produce), it could also bring down the cost of production of e-ink by orders of magnitude.
The results of cheaper screens could be exciting — everyone has talked about screens replacing paper for decades, but the cost of a sheet of A4 is difficult to beat. Kindles are already pretty inexpensive, at $109 — if you can slash the cost of the screen even further, inter-office memos might soon take on a whole new appearance.