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The Kingrow K1 probably isn’t the best smartphone for mobile gaming, watching videos, or framing the perfect photo… because you’d probably want a color display for any of those things, and the Kingrow K1 doesn’t have one.
What it does have is an E Ink display that’s easy to see in direct sunlight and which doesn’t draw a lot of power. Kingrow says the smartphone gets up to 2 days of battery life during normal usage, 7 days if you disable wireless and just use it for reading, and 15 days in standby.
The company unveiled the phone recently, and now it’s up for pre-order for $299 and up through a crowdfunding campaign at Indiegogo.
[...] That $299 price only covers the first 400 orders. After that, the price goes up to $349, and the phone has an estimated shipping date of August, 2019.
Link to their Indiegogo page.
Source: https://liliputing.com/2019/05/kingrow-k1-e-ink-smartphone-hits-indiegogo-for-299-and-up.html
(Score: 2) by petecox on Friday May 31 2019, @03:24AM
Specs say it's a MediaTek chip running Oreo AOSP, having sideloaded the Kindle app.
I thought most e-readers (kindle, kobo) used i.MX to drive the e-ink display - c.f. Purism's Librem 5.
So they probably don't want to overstate battery life if using a generalised smartphone chip that isn't optimised for e-ink drains more power?