E-ink Stock Price Surges on Rumor of Dual-Screen iPhone
Here’s a rumor which I don’t find plausible but is still too juicy to ignore.
The Taipei Times reports that a rumor is circulating to the effect that Apple is working on a dual-screen smartphone similar to the Yotaphone 2:
Shares of E Ink Holdings Co yesterday rallied to an almost four-year high on speculation that Apple Inc might introduce a dual screen in its next iPhone model using E Ink’s energy-efficient e-paper displays.
The stock price of E Ink surged 3.62 percent to NT$24.35 yesterday, retreating from an early gain of 5.53 percent. The closing price was the highest since Nov. 2, 2012. Turnover was the largest in a month at 34.74 million shares.
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The rally in E Ink’s stock price was prompted by a report by the Economic Daily News that Apple has requested E Ink to send products for sampling and certification after Yota Devices’ dual-screen YotaPhone 2 impressed the US consumer electronics giant.
“We are aggressively exploring business opportunities to use our e-paper displays as secondary screens on mobile phones,” an E Ink public relations official said by telephone yesterday.
The official declined to comment on information on any single customer.
As per Apple’s usual pattern, they would be launching a product which had been tried before, with little success. There are a number of products which add this type of functionality to an iPhone, and several dual-screen Android smartphones have hit the market.
Popslate and InkCase, for example, have released cases which add an E-ink screen to the rear of the iPhone.
Yota Devices has released two smartphones, and so have several Chinese smartphone makers. And E-ink is working on just the kind of solution Apple would want (and so is Microsoft).
None of those products worked very well or had much commercial success, but Apple has in the past shown that they can copy an idea, improve it, and make it work for the first time.
But as much as I would like this rumor to be true, I suggest that you take it with a grain of salt.
The original source, Economic Daily News, is so unreliable that I usually assume any of its rumors are false. In my experience they’re the Daily Mail of Taiwan tech news, second only to Digitimes in their willingness to publish any juicy rumor.
And even if this rumor is true, I would remind you that there is a huge difference between asking for specs and technical info and producing a device.
Requesting technical info (assuming it really happened) merely tells us that Apple is experimenting with the idea in their R&D labs.
We won’t know that Apple plans to follow through and actually make a dual-screen smartphone until the components, diagrams, blueprints, or other details start leaking at the factory.
So until that happens, I would not get your hopes up.
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