You might not have heard of Mirasol before, but we’ve been keeping a close eye on the Qualcomm-owned company since it showed off its colour screen tech late last year. The unusual and full colour displays it’s priming are easy on the eye and vivid too, but a big USP is the benefits they bring to battery life on gadgets sporting them. How big a boost are we talking? In a wide ranging interview, a Mirasol exec declared to us that an iPad with a Mirasol screen in could last three times what it can do now.
We sat down with Cheryl Goodman, Mirasol’s marketing director, to talk about the company’s plans in a post iPad world. Now that Apple’s shown that LCD screens might just match eInk for reading with the iPad, we wanted to know what benefits Mirasol’s colour screens still had for customers with the first Mirasol e-reader not shipping until later this year.
Mirasol’s not phased by the onset of the iPad and its 9.7-inch screen, and Goodman sees a growing market of mid-range e-readers underneath the iPad, with a battery life in between that of eInk (Black and white, with very slow page refreshes), and LCD (Backlit, fast frame rates for video), which would use Mirasol’s MEMS technology screens.
The prototype she demoed (Previously shown at CES in January) certainly gives her argument a good grounding: you could read full colour magazines for hours without the hint of eye strain, and the 15 frames per second refresh rate is enough for short video clips (Shipping products will be able to go up to a smoother 30fps however).
That’s the plan for Mirasol initially, but even Goodman isn’t convinced this is the only place to concentrate on. “E-readers, are they really going to be successful?” she asked us before going on to hint at much smaller and larger screens. “The technology itself has no limitation of scale,” she told us.
“We see a huge opportunity in the e-reader market. I believe the market size right now is about 4million (sales)….that’s significant, but not nearly as significant as the 4 billion handset market,” she said.
We were shown a slide with the company’s roadmap, and sure enough, it’s gunning to squeeze Mirasol screens into smartphones by 2012. Goodman wouldn’t go on record as to who it was partnering with, but said “top tier” manufacturers were lined up, and tantalisingly mentioned the fact that Mirasol is “committed to LG on an unspecified project”. If you care to join the dots, we wouldn’t be surprised if we saw an LG phone in the next few years with superb outdoor visibility and an epic battery life – Goodman says that Mirasol phones would add an “additional forty percent battery life”.
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When it’s able to produce larger screens too (Something yet to be shown to the press), Mirasol will be gunning for the tablet space too. While Goodman heaped praise on Apple for almost creating the market for slate computers overnight after years of unsuccessful MID attempts (“What Apple has done with the iPad is validated a need in the market place. We applaud that”), she’s hoping that customers will prefer the lack of a backlight, and battery boost Mirasol’s screens should be able to provide compared to traditional LCD.
So much so in fact that she claimed Mirasol could triple the already healthy battery life of the iPad itself. “If you were to take an iPad device and you were to put a Mirasol display in its place, you could have three times, four times the amount of battery life, so instead of ten hours you get thirty hours. And that’s what consumers are expecting from these immersive reading device,” she said.
Has Mirasol been in talks with Apple directly we asked? Goodman declined to comment, saying that “We have ongoing conversations with everyone involve din this space”, and while we’re not convinced so long as the company is stuck showing a 5.7-inch prototype, we’ve got fingers crossed Steve Jobs picks up the phone in the not too distant future.
Us though? We’re holding out for a smart-book with a Mirasol screen in (Goodman says if manufacturers “want the keyboard” it’s their decision). A MeeGo or Android netbook with a low power ARM chip, and a screen that’s visible outdoors could become the ultimate productivity tool. Whether it’s Mirasol, Pixel Qi or Liquavista who cracks it first, our viewing options are about to get much wider in the next few years.
Out TBC | £TBC | Mirasol
