Modos Wants to Bring You an E Ink Laptop

While it certainly has drawbacks — most notably slow refresh speeds — E Ink display technology is quite remarkable. Not only are E Ink screens very readable (even in direct sunlight), but they're very efficient. The don't require much power to refresh the screen and don't require any power at all to maintain a static image. But E Ink technology is still struggling to find a place in the consumer device market, with the only major use today being for ebook readers. Modos wants to change that and bring you an E Ink laptop.

The Modos Paper Laptop will not be advertised as a replacement for gaming laptops or even ultrabooks. Instead, it will fill a niche in the market for a machine focused on reading and writing. Its large E Ink will provide plenty of real estate for text, but will also sip power and reduce eye strain. Combined with the efficient Amlogic A311D hexa-core SoC, it should have an extraordinarily long battery life — probably measured in days instead of hours. That makes it perfect for writers who want to spend a weekend working in solitude and don't want to bother with chargers.

At this time, the Modos Paper Laptop is just a nice rendered image and a prototype cobbled together in the shell of an old IBM ThinkPad laptop. The final product, which may or may not look like that render, is still very much in development. Whether we will ever see that final product at all is yet to be seen. Modos seems to be the brainchild of Alexander Soto, who is currently recruiting engineers and developers to join the Modos community pilot program. In this post from January 1st, 2020, Soto said Modos hopes build the Paper Laptop with the community "over the next year." We hope they can achieve that, because this looks like the perfect device for many of us.