Kindle evangelist Jeff Bezos, chairman and CEO of Amazon responds: “We would love to have color but electronic ink doesn’t do color.”

So what is electronic ink you asked? The source of the electronic ink for Kindle explains it as follows on their website:

An Electronic Paper Display is a display that possess a paper-like high contrast appearance, ultra-low power consumption, and a thin, light form. It gives the viewer the experience of reading from paper, while having the power of updatable information.

EPDs are a technology enabled by electronic ink – ink that carries a charge enabling it to be updated through electronics. Electronic ink is ideally suited for EPDs as it is a reflective technology which requires no front or backlight, is viewable under a wide range of lighting conditions, including direct sunlight, and requires no power to maintain an image.

From what I have learned adding color to electronic ink isn’t yet on the horizon. Let me know if you have an information that indicates it might be closer to being a reality.

Resources:

See more about the Kindle at Amazon…

Related article Bezos On Kindle: ‘We Would Love To Have Color’—And Every Book Ever

From the special illumination effects on the keypad and side of the phone that interact with the display to the color accents to the sleek stainless steel finish the design appeals to me.

What I found most fascinating was that you have the ability to set the light effects and phone themes and you can set to “change with the seasons, as day turns to night or when the weekend begins.”

“It’s the details that set these phones apart,” explains Steve Walker, Head of Product Marketing at Sony Ericsson. “Our designers have taken inspiration from nature and the Nordic light to produce phones that are beautiful to look at and alive with energy. They appeal to those that want to celebrate their individuality and express themselves through their choice of phone.” [from phonecontent.com]

The T650 is available in either Growing Green and Midnight Blue.

From Hewlett-Packard Co.’s BMW inspired designs to Sun Microsystems designs reminiscent of rockin’ stereo systems these manufactures know that even for enterprise-class IT system design you need to speak the “design language” of color and shape.

From the article:

You might even be surprised where the ideas for those LED-lit, honeycomb-vented, stylized aluminum boxes came from and just how much impact those slick designs have on your decision to fork out thousands of dollars on even the most expensive mainframes, servers and PCs. Even those flashy exterior lights on your hard disk drives have a measure of psychology behind them because manufacturers know certain bright colors evoke succinct messages in the mind of a techie.

George Daniels, the group manager at HP’s Enterprise Design and Usability Center, learned just how important design language can be when, not long ago, he chose to design a blue universal latch hood for a server line. The color blue erroneously screamed to corporate IT workers “turn this off before opening” even though the cover had nothing to do with the operation of the machine. After receiving user complaints from IT admins who’d been shutting down servers to open the hood, Daniels and his team of eight engineers quickly changed the color to HP’s standard port (purple), which tells a user, “I’m hot-swappable.” The example shows how critical computer design, right down to the color, is in providing IT workers visual signals to do their jobs.

See a slide show of the latest designs and read the rest of the article…

I keep an eye on the science and research publications to see what may be on the horizon for color in the future.

Even if I don’t fully understand the impact of the latest reserch it still sparks my imagination and opens my mind to new possiblities for the future as well as for using the materials available to me today.

This week Chemical Technology: A magazine highlighting the latest applications and technological aspects of research across the chemical sciences reports:

A simple process for preparing light-emitting layers of silica with wide colour variation has been developed by Italian scientists.

The promise of preparing white light emitting materials for flat displays stimulated a team led by Gianluca Accorsi of National Research Council, Bologna, to develop luminescent hybrid layers.

Rsearchers are looking at this technolgy for “colour tunable luminescent devices” and with so many interesting developments such as this one coming about it’s easy to envision color being used in new ways and across many new applications.

Maybe before long we’ll be painting our rooms with light rather than pigment or using light and color in other ways we’ve only dreamed of in the past.

The picture is from Chemical Technology and you can read the full article here.