My Kindle only handles 167 DPI (the measure of dot pitch, or crispness of the font); the Pixel Qi, Mary Lou said, does 205 DPI.

The Time article also contains the following very odd assertion:

While at MIT, as the founding CTO of One Laptop Per Child, she concentrated on the display and decided that that’s all that matters these days. The chips and operating systems are fungible. But, as you probably know, there was a bit of a religious split among the team members over which was the best display technology: one group went off to start E Ink, while Mary Lou and her husband, John Ryan, launched Pixel Qi.

The timeline behind this claim is strange because E Ink Corporation was founded in 1997, and OLPC was formed in 2005. Both groups did emerge from the MIT Media Lab. Maybe Josh Quittner is referring to some early precursor of the OLPC?

One disheartening note for us tablet lovers, he also said it was ‘quite hard’ to deal with touch screen, as the touch overlay makes the screen look worse. I don’t know just how, he didn’t elaborate. Maybe it cuts contrast? This is another blow to Negroponte’s hopes for the XO2 with dual touchscreens. But maybe the overlay doesn’t hurt the picture all that much; time will tell.

In addition to e-ink’s lower power draw, he also said that e-ink’s white was whiter than the 3Qi screen. This is also a bit disappointing, as the ‘white’ on the e-ink screen is not exactly white to my eyes.

I’m still pulling for PixelQi and I’m eager to see one of their screens in a real, for-sale product this fall.

I’m not getting excited yet, because we don’t know what this screen will do to battery life. It’s going to take a lot to beat the battery life of an e-ink screen . . .

On the contrary, it should be quite straightforward to estimate what this screen will do to battery life. There have been versions of this screen in the wild since November of 2007. Anyone who has an XO knows exactly how this screen behaves.

The only question I have at this point is what the resolution is exactly. It looks like (pure guess) it might be able to do 1280×1024 on a netbook. That would be a great improvement over my Eee901′s 1024×600 display would be wonderful. I would put my XO display on my Eee in a heartbeat.

As for competing with E-Ink’s power savings, it will never happen. However, that is irrelevant. The fact that the screen can do colour and video as well as having an optional backlight make it far superior to E-Ink’s offering. I already get 11 hours of battery life out of my Eee with Ubuntu, anyway. If the screen saved more power, I would have the best laptop uptime in history.

PixelQi will definitely change everything.