Electronic displays are almost always a compromise. LCDs are great, except they gulp down power. E-ink is great, except that it can't do video. If these two types of displays were to have a love child, it would be Mirasol, since the Mirasol display seems to be good at just about everything.
Mirasol works differently from any other type of display technology. It's kinda like e-ink in that it's reflecting light to make an image instead of transmitting an image directly, meaning that the brighter the ambient environment is, the brighter Mirasol gets. If it's dark, Mirasol relies on an embedded 'front light' to become visible.
To make color images, Mirasol uses the same techniques that, believe it or not, comes naturally to butterflies. It involves groups of tiny pixels with even tinier ridges that reflect only red, blue, or green light. Turning these pixels on and off in different combinations makes any color you want. This happens fast enough that video and gaming is no problem. They've even managed to integrate capacitive touch sensing into their screens without sacrificing any of its other sweet properties.
The main thing that makes Mirasol so much better than LCDs is how little power it uses. When displaying a static image, Mirasol uses fifty times less power than an LCD does. Its "front light" uses between a half and a third of the power as a backlit LCD, and when you add up all the savings, it's like doubling or tripling the battery life of something like an iPad, without changing the battery at all. Also, some preliminary studies have shown — and, of course, you should take the following as just food for thought — that between 80% and 90% of people prefer the look of a Mirasol display over an LCD display, and Mirasol is supposedly much friendlier on the eyes.
Mirasol says that they have lots of big names interested in their screens, and it's easy to see why. Nothing is in production yet, but Qualcomm has just spent about a billion dollars on a new plant specifically designed to produce the Mirasol displays, which should be fully operational by 2012, so plan on trading in your smartphone/tablet/laptop for a new one sometime around then.
It's worth mentioning that Qualcomm is mostly working on developing the screen itself as opposed to platforms that take advantage of it, but they've got some solid infrastructure to build on (like their Snapdragon mobile processor), so it wouldn't be entirely surprising if we were to see some thing on the consumer end from them at some point in the future.
Via Mirasol
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