After phones, the next big thing in foldables could be e-readers. The MooInk V delivers over 50,000 colours at 300ppi resolution, and it folds like a real book.
Pricing and availability haven't yet been announced, but it could provide inspiration for other manufacturers – such as Amazon, perhaps.
In our Kindle Colorsoft review we described Amazon's first colour ebook reader as "a very big first step" into a more colourful world. And now China's Readmoo has launched what could be the next evolutionary shift – the "world's first" folding colour e-reader.
The MooInk V has several advantages over Amazon's colour Kindle, apart from its most obvious unique feature.
Its 8-inch display is based on E-Ink's Gallery 3 technology, and that's a big leap forward in term of colour reproduction. Where the Colorsoft can show 4,096 shades, Gallery 3 is capable of displaying over 50,000.
The resolution is better too. The Kindle Colorsoft can only display at 300ppi in monochrome mode, but the mooInk V can do that in full colour.
Why did a folding e-reader take so long?
You'd have thought a folding e-reader would have arrived years ago, but the tech to do it is tricky. E Ink displays are fairly thick, much more so than the OLEDs used in phones, like the Samsung Galaxy Fold 6.
That makes designing a folding e-reader more difficult than a tablet or handset, and Readmoo says it's been working on this project for nine years.
As with other folding devices, a foldable screen is exposed to stresses and strains that static technologies don't need to worry about. But Readmoo reckons it's solved that problem too.
It says its e-reader has been tested and survived over 200,000 folds. That's the same number of folds that Samsung's folding phones are designed to endure.
We don't yet know when the MooInk V will launch, what countries it'll be available in or what it'll cost. But even if it doesn't reach these shores, the E-ink display it uses will – and if it doesn't arrive in a near-future Kindle device I'll be amazed.
