Foldable Amazon Kindles with color screens might be headed our way

Kindles are great! I was one of those paper snobs once, advocating for physical books, relishing the smell of paper and ink, the whole show. I quickly realized, though, that first – you can have both if you like – keep your precious book collection at home (and smell it all you like), and travel with your ereader. Second, I love trees, and I’m worried about them, and paper is made out of trees.Now, the above might be an extreme oversimplification of the matter, but Kindles (and other ereaders) lack one key component that can elevate them to new heights – color. E-Ink screens are great for battery life, and they’re easy on the eyes but if you want to read comic books, or magazines on your ereader, you’re bound to the various shades of gray (not referencing the book, for the sake of everything sacred!)This limitation might soon be history, as the company E Ink (the one that makes those displays) has shown its next Gallery 3 screen, and… wait for it – it can display colors!

“E Ink is very excited to announce this significant breakthrough with E Ink Gallery 3,” said Johnson Lee, CEO of E Ink. “For the first time, our Gallery full color ink platform series can be offered for an enhanced reading and shopping experience for eBooks, and for colorful document viewing and editing in eNotes.”

The colors in Gallery 3 are produced by a four particle ink system: cyan, magenta, yellow and white – much like the way LCD screens get their colorful pixels. There are limitations to the system, of course, and they concern mainly update times.

The new color E-ink screen can refresh black and white pages at 350 ms, whilte there are three modes for color – a fast 500 ms mode, a standard 750-1000 ms mode, and the best color reproduction mode that takes one and a half seconds to update.

One and a half seconds might sound like an eternity but the first generation Gallery screens were refreshing in color mode at 10-second intervals! Yep, this is not the first color E-ink display but it might be the first that is advanced enough to be used in consumer products.

Foldable Kindles?