Image: E Ink
Tech
E Ink upgraded the screen found in most color e-readers
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Published 10/15/2026 11:00:00 AM
E Ink upgraded the screen found in most color e-readers
The company’s new Kaleido 4 color e-paper technology is debuting in a new note-taking tablet launching in China.
The company’s new Kaleido 4 color e-paper technology is debuting in a new note-taking tablet launching in China.
is a senior reporter who’s been covering and reviewing the latest gadgets and tech since 2006, but has loved all things electronic since he was a kid.
E Ink announced the next generation of its Kaleido color e-paper screen technology today, delivering several welcome improvements. The company’s existing Kaleido 3 displays can be found in e-readers and tablets from companies like Kobo, PocketBook, and Boox, while Amazon’s Kindle Colorsoft uses a customized version to improve performance. The new Kaleido 4 technology addresses some of Kaleido 3’s shortcomings with improved color reproduction, better contrast, and faster screen refreshes.
Other E Ink technologies, like its Gallery 3 display found in the Remarkable Paper Pro, use colored pigments that move around to form full-color images, but Kaleido 3 employs a color filter over an e-paper panel with just black and white pigments. That approach results in color e-paper screens with fast refresh rates, but it generates color images at a lower resolution with a limited palette that tends to make them look desaturated. The extra color filter also leaves plain text looking darker than it does on e-readers with only a black-and-white E Ink screen.
E Ink claims its new Kaleido 4 display tech doubles the “color gamut volume” of its predecessor, which should improve how color images look. However, the technology is still limited to producing just 4,096 colors (modern LCD and OLED displays can produce millions) and, as with Kaleido 3, at a lower resolution than black-and-white text is displayed. But Kaleido 4 does increase white reflectance by 15 percent and boosts contrast by 50 percent, so plain text will potentially look less muddy than it often does with Kaleido 3.
The reason that E Ink’s seemingly superior Gallery 3 technology hasn’t been used in more devices is because those displays have a slow refresh rate that can often feel frustrating to use. Kaleido 3 refreshes much faster, and thanks to a new oxide TFT backplane (that sounds similar to what the Kindle Colorsoft uses), Kaleido 4’s performance is even faster with refresh rates up to 18fps, making the screens capable of playing back video.
Companies like Amazon and Kobo haven’t yet announced any new devices that will feature Kaleido 4 screens, but Hanvon Technology will be the first to adopt the new technology in its upcoming M10C II tablet. It will only be available in China, but the M10C II will feature a Kaleido 4 display with a micro-etched tempered-glass surface designed to reduce glare while providing a more authentic paper-like feel when taking notes using its battery-free pen.
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The Genie 4 world model offers more realism and can create audio to accompany its interactive worlds.
The Genie 4 world model offers more realism and can create audio to accompany its interactive worlds.
is a senior reporter covering technology, gaming, and more. He joined The Verge in 2019 after nearly two years at Techmeme.
Google announced today its Genie 4 world model for generating interactive experiences using AI. The company says the model has four main updates: It allows for more realistic worlds, lets users update an experience in real time with a natural language prompt, can generate audio, and uses Gemini 3.8 Flash under the hood to help with its simulations. It also can create experiences that are about two minutes long, up from one minute for the previous Genie 3 model.
Google is pitching Genie 4 as a tool that could be helpful for things like pre-visualization for filmmakers, prototyping game ideas, and making training scenarios for robots. But the company warns that, as simulations run longer, details and object permanence can shift over time.
I haven’t been able to try Genie 4 for myself — it’s launching first as a “research preview” to “trusted testers” — so I can’t tell you how it compares to the Genie 3-powered Project Genie, which I used to generate bad Nintendo knockoffs. But here are some examples from Google demonstrating what’s possible with the new model.
Genie 4 will be “coming soon” to Google AI Ultra subscribers, Google says, and the company has opened a waitlist where you can apply to be able to try it in Project Genie.
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An update to Firefox’s AI browsing experience can draw from your open tabs to help you fill out forms.
An update to Firefox’s AI browsing experience can draw from your open tabs to help you fill out forms.
is a news writer who covers the streaming wars, consumer tech, crypto, social media, and much more. Previously, she was a writer and editor at MUO.
Mozilla is updating Smart Window — Firefox’s AI-powered browsing experience — with a new feature that can help you fill out online forms based on your open tabs. As an example, Mozilla says Smart Window can pull information from your online portfolio or LinkedIn page to paste your work history into a job application.
You can try out this feature by clicking into a form with at least four text fields. From there, you’ll see an option to “Fill from sources,” which will show all of the tabs Firefox will draw from. You can then select or deselect tabs that you want Firefox to use, and the browser will generate suggestions based on the information in them. This feature currently supports text fields on web forms, but Mozilla is working to add support for dropdown menus and PDFs. Mozilla notes that data from your source pages is shared with Google’s Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite, the AI model that generates the text suggestions.
Along with this update, you can now ask Firefox’s Smart Window to watch a certain webpage for sales, new job listings, and other updates. You can set up a task by typing “/watch” in the Smart Window chat, describing what you’re looking for, and adding the webpages you want to watch. Firefox can then check for updates on a daily or weekly basis, but only when the browser is open.
When Firefox detects the change you’re looking for, it will send you a notification through the Tasks button on the toolbar, or on your desktop (if you have desktop notifications enabled). Firefox will pause watching for updates if it doesn’t detect a change after 60 days, before stopping them completely after 90 days.
Image: Mozilla
These two features are rolling out to the Smart Window beta on desktop in the US and Canada. They’ll be available in other countries in the “coming months.”
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