Qualcomm’s best known for their Snapdragon system on chip that combines a custom designed application processor, graphics processor, and connectivity, but did you know that they also make displays? Back in Februrary 2009 they announced that Inventec, a handset vendor you probably never heard of and likely will never care about, decided to incorporate a 1.1 inch Mirasol display into an Android smartphone that would be always on and display the current time and date, missed calls, texts, those sorts of things. Then a few months later during the same year, in October, they showed off a Mirasol display rendering video at 30 frames per second. After that is was radio silence for 10 months until Taiwanese rumor site DigiTime said that Qualcomm was pouring $2 billion into a factory that would make 5.7 inch Mirasol displays. Qualcomm didn’t acknowledge the rumor until January of this year when they said they’d be investing $1 billion, not $2 billion, into a Mirasol factory, though they failed to specify what exact sizes they’d be making.
So it’s November 2011, what’s new with Mirasol? The Kyobo Book Centre, which Wikipedia calls the largest book seller in South Korea thanks to their 10 stores in 7 cities, has announced the Kyobo e-Reader. It has a 5.7 inch Mirasol display that has a resolution of 1024 x 768 pixels, runs Android 2.3 with a totally custom user interface on top, and has a 1 GHz Qualcomm processor inside. Think of this thing like the South Korean Amazon Kindle Fire. It’s supposed to last 3 weeks during “regular use”, which hasn’t exactly been defined. South Koreans will have access to roughly 90,000 titles, educational videos, and be able to do some basic networking on this thing. It’s going to cost roughly $300.
Now we just have to wait for someone in America to use this technology and we can finally say it’s not just some cockamamie idea from Qualcomm, but an actual viable division within their company. Note that Qualcomm expects to take a $300 million loss on Mirasol during their 2012 fiscal year.
[Additional reading: Reuters]
Update 01: Holy Cow! Apparently Mirasol technology was officially announced in May 2008!
Update 02: Want to know how Mirasol works? Head over here and prepare to have your mind blown.