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The back of your phone is useless. There. I said it. Sure, cameras are back, but what about that empty real estate that monopolizes 90% of the surface area? Honestly, this is where it has to start pulling its weight. However, a fully functioning screen is not the answer. It has a lot of battery consumption, a thick design and a very high price – for what exactly?
The concept of a secondary e-ink screen is not new. yota phone Did this years ago. Ultimately, however, the company declared bankruptcy in 2019, four years after releasing its second device. By then, foldable devices had already been on the market for a few years, making the novelty little more than a passing novelty.
Infinix E-Color Shift improves on Yota’s phones to some extent, by adding color to the mix. However, this is not the full low-power secondary display that the first device promised. Rather, it’s a fun aesthetic addition to the part of your device that’s almost always covered by a case, your hand or the side of a table.
Image Credit: brian heater
Surface is not proper e-ink, and certainly not capital “E” e-ink. The company describes the technology this way, “By applying different voltages, the electric field within the microstructure changes, causing the corresponding color particles to move and display the desired color. This innovative approach allows the phone’s shell to be ‘skinned’ at will, maintaining the display without consuming power.
The technology actually debuted at CES last month, but I was sick in bed at the time, so I’m here to tell you about my experience with E-Color Shift at MWC in Barcelona. After playing with it a bit, I feel justified in mentioning that this is the most prototype of prototypes. Not only is there no real product being talked about here, but the technology Infinix was demonstrating required a dummy unit to connect to an external battery pack.
However, like e-ink, the back panel has the advantage of keeping a stable image even when the battery is not working.
It remains to be seen if it gets licensed by a third party or appears only on Infinix devices. My guess is that the Hong Kong company is hoping for the latter, because it’s hard to imagine many people buying a smartphone based on this technology alone. For one thing, it doesn’t really do much.
For another, as mentioned above, it’ll probably be covered in some form 99% of the time, except for those rare occasions when you want to show a friend the weird thing your phone does.
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