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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 31 2019, @01:04AM
A phone that doesn't work with Facebook is not the phone I'm buying as a Christmas present for ESR.
(Score: 1) by RandomFactor on Friday May 31 2019, @01:11AM
This looks interesting (for the most part i could care less about color on my phone)
Assuming the battery is not replaceable. Doesn't say, so i'm assuming not.
В «Правде» нет известий, в «Известиях» нет правды
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bob_super on Friday May 31 2019, @01:13AM (7 children)
Yay, I don't care about FB and crap, I've always wanted an e-ink for the hughe battery life !
> 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.
W.T.Fuck ?
My phone (Sony compact 2) lasts 5 days, mostly because I don't use the apps you can't use with e-ink.
How the [bleep] do they only get 2 days with an e-ink ?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by EvilSS on Friday May 31 2019, @01:30AM
(Score: 3, Insightful) by PartTimeZombie on Friday May 31 2019, @01:31AM
I wondered the same thing.
Also, if it's $299 in US money, it will be $599 in my local money, and I can buy last year's flagship type phones for that kind of money.
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Friday May 31 2019, @02:17AM
I just checked my phone's Battery tracking thing after it turned on. Display is listed as 24% of the power consumption. So even if that consumed zero power, it wouldn't double battery life.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(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?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 31 2019, @05:52AM (1 child)
Networking
mobile radiation [wikipedia.org] "limited to a equivalent isotropic radiated power (EIRP) radiated power output of 3 watts, and the network continuously adjusts the phone transmitter to the lowest power consistent with good signal quality, reducing it to as low as one milliwatt when near the cell tower."
Take 1W as an average and calculate how long a 3.6V x 1.8Ah battery will last.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday May 31 2019, @04:42PM
Sending a keepalive message every n milliseconds does not draw the equivalent of a Watt.
Yes, on this phone, the Network should be the biggest current draw.
But 2 days is ridiculous, when you're not pounding that big battery with constant FB/IG/YT payloads.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by choose another one on Friday May 31 2019, @08:29AM
> W.T.Fuck ?
> How the [bleep] do they only get 2 days with an e-ink ?
Seconded.
My old blackberry curve used to go almost a week between charges with light use, even with heavy use it did more than 2 days, and it had colour display.
Sad how quickly we forget what we used to be able to do.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Trip on Friday May 31 2019, @01:18AM
The FAQ indicates that band support is limited primarily to bands not available in the US. The only American LTE bands supported are Bands 5 and 41, the latter being a Sprint-only band, and the former being used in a spotty fashion by the other three. In WCDMA and GSM, Band 2 is also supported, which is used by AT&T and T-Mobile, though for how long is an open question.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday May 31 2019, @02:18AM
They did it better, but they're dead now.
https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/19/18508418/yota-devices-bankrupt-yotaphone [theverge.com]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Acabatag on Friday May 31 2019, @03:21AM
As somebody who clung to his paperwhite VGA (256 shades of grey!) for a long long time (I still even HAVE a paperwhite SVGA monitor somewhere in storage) this has a certain appeal. I was cheap back then, had better things to spend money on (solder, chips, etc.), and wasn't willing to pay for color. Before I went Paperwhite VGA, I ran Windows (3) on an obscure variant of EGA that would run on a real original IBM EGA card jumpered in 'EGA monochrome' mode that allowed me to plug a monochrome 'TTL' monitor into an IBM EGA card (one with only the base 64K of RAM.) In 'DOS' that meant you could run 80x43 or 80x50 and the resolution in Windows had a decen aspect ratio (Hercules graphics Windows had an aspect ratio that just sucked.) It also meant that there were NO graphical MS-DOS games that would work.
The idea of an E-ink smartphone inspires a spartan nostalgia in me.
(Score: 4, Touché) by driverless on Friday May 31 2019, @04:56AM
Summarising all of the above, it has a monochrome, slow-update e-ink display, poor battery life, poor feature set, poor band coverage, poor support, and is way overpriced for what it does. Apart from that it's a must-buy.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 31 2019, @05:17AM (1 child)
is that a thing?
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 31 2019, @05:36AM
ASCII one of the old guard.