A handful of phone makers have released dual-screen devices with color screens on one side and monochrome E Ink displays on the other. Kyocera’s latest phone goes all in on the black and white screen.

The KY-O1L is a tiny phone with a 2.8 inch, 480 x 600 pixel electronic paper display.

The whole phone measures just 91mm x 55mm x 5.3mm (3.6″ x 2.2″ x 0.2″) and weighs about 47 grams (1.7 ounces).

Japanese wireless carrier NTT DoCoMo says the  KY-O1L will be available in November. Unfortunately it seems unlikely that we’ll see this tiny phone outside of Japan anytime soon.

The credit card-sized phone doesn’t seem to run Android, but it does have a web browser, calendar, calculator, and some other apps in addition to support for phone calls and text messages.

It has a micro USB port, Bluetooth 4.2, and support for 4G LTE networks with top download speeds of up to 100 Mbps and top upload speeds of 37.5 Mbps. The phone has an IPX2 rating which means it should be safe to splash a bit of water on it, but you don’t want to drop the KY-O1L into a pool or sink full of water.

Kyocera equips the phone with a rather small 380 mAh battery, but the low-power display, simple operating system, and lack of fancy features (like cameras) should help the phone get halfway decent battery life anyway.

via The Verge

 

 

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11 replies on “Kyocera KY-O1L is a phone with a 2.8 inch ePaper display (for Japan)”

  1. Looks similar to the Light Phone 1 & 2. I wish more companies would make things like this here in the US.

  2. Perfect phone for my kids, I wouldn’t want to give him a smartphone because he would be playing video games. With E Ink display phone, that should not be a problem.

  3. This is so cool! If I was to ever to go “low-end” on a mobile phone, this would be it. It wouldn’t cost me a thing to carry this as a secondary device (and as a 4g hotspot) to a larger 7-8″ tablet.

    Not an e-ink user but I would think that black lettering on a white background is easier on the eyes. Maybe they’ve done extensive testing, especially in low-light conditions… and settled on flipping the colors.

    1. that’s what I said too, then I saw another site say it will be around $300

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