The Modos Paper Monitor
The medium is the message^W <i>affordance</i>.<p>During the aughts, I got used to saying &quot;Linux is not Windows&quot; --- if you&#x27;re looking for a Microsoft experience on a Free Software operating system ... you&#x27;re liable to be disappointed.<p>If you accept the strengths, and weaknesses, of a platform, you&#x27;re going to be far happier.<p>The first computers I used didn&#x27;t have e-ink displays.  They had <i>ink</i> displays.  Teletype access to an early Unix system, mostly offering BSD games.  No, I didn&#x27;t do Real Work on those systems....<p>But I <i>was</i> doing real work on glass-tty VT-200 Wyse terminals about a decade later, also on campus-wide Unix servers.  (Benefit:  walk into any terminal room, log on, and all my work was Just There.)<p>As I&#x27;ve noted for a while, E-Ink has features which differ from emissive (OLED &#x2F; LCD) displays:<p>- Persistence is free.  Once the display is set, <i>it does not change</i>, even with power shut off.<p>- Pixels are cheap.  Current displays tend around 220--300 DPI.  That&#x27;s the effective resolution of most laserprinters (given toner drift and paper coarseness).<p>- Refreshes are ... slowish.  Not seconds, but 4-10 Hz is a typically upper end, rather than 60--120 FPS of an emissive display.  Higher-quality refreshes may be slower.<p>- Colors are nonexistent to few.  My monochrome display offers 16 greyscale shades, though with dithering and&#x2F;or halftoning, that increases.  Photographs appear slightly posterised without those.  Colour displays exist, though they&#x27;re limited in size&#x2F;format, muted in saturation, slower than B&amp;W e-ink, and carry a price premium.<p>- Paginated navigation is <i>strongly</i> preferred to scrolling.  A single whole-screen flush is much better than scrolling a pixel at a time.  This is where EInkBro really shines over conventional tablet browsers, in that it supports paginated navigation through a web page.<p>- Displays are reflective rather than emissive.  The brighter the ambient light, <i>the easier the display is to read</i>, with direct sunlight being the optimum.  I suspect colour displays will also reflect a mix of ink-vs-light colour design &#x2F; mixing.<p>Ultimately, e-ink applications and platforms should play to the medium&#x27;s strengths.  <i>E-Ink does fixed text and graphics exceptionally well.</i>  Operating systems, graphical shells, and controls which reflect this should do well.  Those that fight these characteristics will deliver disappointing experiences.