iRex technologies located at the Hi Tech Campus in Eindhoven are building one of the first actual working and usable devices that use epaper displays.
Today I met two of their software engineers at T-DOSE. They were demoing their technology. They basically explained me that they are extremely interested in having a framework for implementing an E-mail client in gtk+. Yes, they are very interested in tinymail. Reading E-mail is absolutely a very typical use-case for such devices.
Their device runs gtk+ 2.6 on a Linux kernel. They also told me that they are trying to get into our GNOME Mobile And Embedded community and that they are interested in meeting us, GNOME developers.
I promised to help them with this. So everybody in the GNOME community who is into embedded & mobile, please contact iRex Technologies. Say hi, tell them what you do for gtk+ & co, how you can help and stuff like that.
I told them to visit our conferences, like GUADEC and the Boston Summit, to check out GMAE, to check out Maemo (they obviously already did) and GPE (same, they are even using pieces of GPE on the device), to talk to the guys that did Pango: on such a screen, you know, refreshes are very slow. Once set, however, it doesn’t consume battery anymore, nor does it emit light. This makes it ideal for book and text reading (you are reading the display just like how you are reading a piece of paper or a book). It implies some changes to our widgets, like triggering when to redraw the screen. Redrawing is not going to be cheap anymore.
I gave them some GNOME-technology company names. I, of course, don’t know who exactly they will contact.
I saw the device, used it. And indeed, it’s definitely not vaporware. They want us, the GNOME community, to get involved.
I suggested them that they should give some of their devices to our developers. For example, at a conference like GUADEC. They didn’t promise anything (the two guys were only software engineers, not managers). But they were going to try, as they indeed realize that community members can’t afford to buy every single device that they would like to target. It’s going to be difficult, they told me, because a lot of their stuff is still research and development.
Their forum and their website.