At the Taipei International Book Fair, Qualcomm has announced that Kobee has selected the Mirasol display technology for their Jin Yong Reader (the reader has been named after Jin Young, a popular author in China ). The tablet features a 5.7″ 1024×768 Mirasol display, a 1GHz SnapDragon S2 processor and a customized Android 2.3. This device looks just like the Bambook Sunflower that we talked about at CES.
If you are not familiar with the Mirasol display technology, it has some of the advantages of e-Ink, which consumes power only when pixels change, and some strengths of LCD, as it is in color and has a refresh rate which is fast enough for basic screen animations. At the moment, Mirasol has been used to power “super eBooks”, but not to replace conventional LCDs – yet.
I remember Mirasol starting out with tiny screens just a few of years ago, and at CES we had an opportunity to play the same 5.7″ display on a device just like this one. The screen was good enough to display movies, but the image quality and refresh rates were not yet suitable for “entertainment”, although it would be fine for “education”. At this point, it’s not clear what the pricing is going to be like.