I’ve been watching the evolution of Mirasol ever since Qualcomm first announced a couple of years ago. I’ve been eager to see it in real products, because it has the potential to completely replace e-ink for e-readers, especially now that more and more people want a multi-functional tablet.
We’ve heard rumors long ago that Amazon might be one of Qualcomm’s biggest customers, because of their Kindle Fire tablet, but this year we found out that this was not going to happen after all, perhaps because Qualcomm wouldn’t have been available to offer so many panels at once, and maybe because Amazon didn’t think the technology is something up to their standard either.
From the video we can see that Mirasol can run up to 40 FPS, which is miles ahead of e-ink which can run at something like 5 FPS. This helps not only with the general UI speed, but also with watching videos.
The colors are quite a bit washed out, so it’s no Super AMOLED, but again its main competitor here is e-ink, which it tops in terms of color. Just like e-ink it’s a reflective display. It doesn’t have any backlighting, which means it’s just as easy on the eye as e-ink. In fact it’s based on technology that mimics the butterfly’s wings, which aren’t colored, but the light reflection shows them in different colors. This is mainly how Mirasol is supposed to work, too.
Another advantage of Mirasol is that it’s also very energy efficient, especially compared to an LCD. It remains to be seen if it beats e-ink too, but I’m pretty sure that if it just lasts several times as much as an LCD device, it won’t matter if it beats e-ink.
Will Amazon re-consider it for Kindle Fire in the future? I would hope so – at least for the 7″ version. They could make a larger 10″ version that is LCD based, with more vivid colors, and combine both the current Fire and their e-ink readers into one, by offering a 7″ Mirasol reader that’s just as easy on the eye, has long battery life, but you can also use for videos, games, and so on, just like a tablet.
Here’s the video I’ve been talking about with the Kyobo Reader, the first reader with Mirasol:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7SUv9Jd490&feature=player_embedded