Also, the faster you refresh a e-paper display, the power consumption can even surpass power efficient LCD tech so it's just not viable in that case unless the panel has the capability of partial refresh but even then it's not ideal for consuming fast moving content.
E-paper displays are power efficient for static images (books, price tags, advertising, notifications, etc) but if you have to refresh them fully several times a second, the power consumption goes through the roof (moving the e-ink particles around in their pixel compartments requires more effort than rotating LCD crystals/OLED).
We hope this may partially address the power consumption/efficiency of static/dynamic content related to e-paper displays.
It is unclear to this day why it never made it to market considering that E-Ink is a far inferior product.
The short of it seems to be that production runs of Mirasol panels had very high fault rates, which lead to delays and losses. Qualcomm ultimately decided to abandon it and to fully focus on the Snapdragon processors which were perfectly aligned with the booming IoT space at the time.
Mirasol was apparently very promising and ahead of its time, albeit immature. It was based on electro-mechanical mirror pixels rather than dye. The biggest technical downside seemed to have been that the colors were pretty washed out and bland.
EDIT: It actually did make it to market. There was even a smartwatch powered by Mirasol (the Toq). It was never implemented by the big e-Reader brands though.
It does look good in the comparison you linked. It is being backlit though, while the E-ink is not. Maybe the mentioned blandness is more of a problem when used fully passively.
It seemed to have been a good competitor regardless, and it's sad that it got mothballed.
(there were warnings though that using the higher refresh rate settings would greatly affect longevity of the screen though.)
7/10 would not recommend.
Why no recommendation? Seemed like a positive overall experience.
Also the eink monitor I bought for $1k is quite small by today's standards, so I couldn't utilize as effectively as a vertical monitor which keeps more continuous text visible at a time.
The tech on its own? 7/10. I love it and it only lost points because the driver documentation and accompanying tool interface wasn't fully translated from the original Chinese. Ghosting issues and a relatively slow refresh rate were known tradeoffs at purchase time. so can't fault it for that.