14 DAY TRIAL // It appears that even supposedly promising projects, in this case an e-reader display of 5.7-inches, sometimes meet an untimely end, even if only so that the road could be clear for a new undertaking to be embarked upon.
On the market of e-book readers, e-paper displays from E Ink are the most commonly encountered.
This is because they have a low power draw and have a look that resembles genuine paper, even though they lack color support.
Grated, E Ink has been developing some color solutions, but the likes of the Amazon Kindle and B&N Nook still use standard e-paper (except for the Nook Color, of course).
It would appear that one competitor to this technology, and the color models in development, has now been canned.
Some users may have been aware of the fact that Qualcomm was working on a 5.7-inch e-reader equipped with a Mirasol panel.
Turns out that the project failed to live up to expectations, hence the project being dropped, but this doesn't seem to be the end for the technology, as a new one is going to be designed.
“We were getting ready to launch a low volume ereader product, but I didn't like the whole system. I didn't want to launch our first product and have it be something that we didn't really like, so we basically decided not to launch it, and instead just focus on the next version of it,” said Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs.
If the report is to be believed, the folks over at Qualcomm are optimistic and fairly eager to see where their efforts take them.
"We have a really interesting roadmap - we're starting out on ereaders because we figured having E Ink as a competing technology was a good way to get started," Jacobs said.
"But if you think about the power consumption of the screens that are out now [on tablets], they're very bright OLED screens that use up a lot of the power of the battery. We don't today have as vibrant colour as an OLED display - but we have a roadmap that gets us to a much brighter color."