Mp3 player with e-ink display and long battery life?

How about making an mp3 player without video of photo support that uses an e-ink or other very efficient monochrome display, so it could have the display on all the time the player is on and still give 50+ hours of battery life.

JK98, I have never seen anyone with as many persistent views on how MP3 players should be changed.   ;)    More power to you!

A question about e-ink:  can it display changing conditions without significant use of power?  What I was thinking is, if the display is always on (which would be sweet!), will significant power be used to reflect the changes in the progress bar, time remaining, getting the next song info. up and showing, etc.?

It could be that the power draw would be minimal, especially if only the changing elements (progess bar, etc.) need to draw power.

It wouldn’t change that much though. It wouldn’t need to change more than one time a second. Parts of the display would change much less frequently than that. Compare that to an lcd which refreshes many times a second.

I thought so.  This could be a cool idea.  And with an ever-present clock screen option. 

An old fashioned black and white LCD screen might work better.  They also use extremely little power, but are cheaper and have much better refresh rate (eink is pretty slow and uses more power the more often you change it).  I think someone tested on the old ipods and the screen on or off had almost no effect on battery life at all.  

Ah, that’s my original–and still running–Soviet tank of a player, the iRiver iHP-140 (which has been Rockbox’ed, by the way).  Black (well, kinda gray) and white (well, kinda dim blue) LCD display that is always on (the backlight for the display turns off after a preset amount of time, to save battery charge).  In fact, it took me time to get used to a display that turns off, and it still seems like a bit of a malfunction to me (the power of imprinting, I guess!). 

@miikerman wrote:

Ah, that’s my original–and still running–Soviet tank of a player, the iRiver iHP-140 (which has been Rockbox’ed, by the way).  Black (well, kinda gray) and white (well, kinda dim blue) LCD display that is always on (the backlight for the display turns off after a preset amount of time, to save battery charge).  In fact, it took me time to get used to a display that turns off, and it still seems like a bit of a malfunction to me (the power of imprinting, I guess!). 

Sounds also like my iPod Mini…