E Ink, a leading company in electronic paper display technologies, announced that the Casio Hitachi Mobile Communications joint venture has chosen the E Ink Vizplex Imaging Film based displays to be integrated into its new handsets.

The very-first mobile phone to use an E Ink Vizplex display is already on the market and it's a Hitachi one, namely Hitachi W61H. The handset was first announced at the beginning of the year and is now available in Japan only, from KDDI au, the country's second largest mobile carrier. The E Ink external display packed in W61H is a 2.7 inch one that can show up to 96 various images created by the famous Japanese designer Yurio Seki and animated by incoming calls and messages or when the handset is flipped (it's a clamshell, by the way).

The next mobile phone to rely on E Ink's technology is Casio G'zOne, which will also be released by KDDI au and which comes with two displays: a Vizplex and a secondary "silhouette" one. The G'zOne should hit the Japanese market at the end of this summer.

"We wanted features such as outdoor sunlight readability, 180 degree viewing angle, extremely thin, rugged, flexible display that consumed very little power. E Ink's electrophoretic display technology provided all that and more, something we could not get from other display technologies," stated Satoshi Shirasawa, Marketing Manager at Casio Hitachi Mobile Communications.

Sriram Peruvemba, Vice President of Marketing, E Ink Corp., also said: "Fashion is a key driver in today's world. E Ink offers a smart surface that changes the design and brings mobile phones to the fashion forefront of technology."

No word yet on whether handsets featuring E Ink displays will be available in other countries except Japan, but let's hope that sometime in the future this will happen.