NEWS: iPad gouges netbook sales

I'll leave it to you for the next time you need a pickup line for the Waffle House gals: "Hey baby, guess who I am!!!"

But you wouldn't be fooling any one of them with your fly open revealing your candy striped boxers...

Screw the boxers, whip out that whang!

My old Audiovox Maestro Pocket PC used a transreflective color LCD screen- it was absolutely pathetic looking compared to backlit screens (washed out with a pinkish hue) but does work very well in sunlight compared to any other color LCD I've owned. It's obsolete now (8 years old) but I've epurposed it, with my old Compactflash GPS module, as a dedicated car sat nav. The transreflective display is particularly suited for it.

I had an older Palm with a transreflective colour LCD screen, the tech has gotten better since then but it's still not quite there for indoor or low-light viewing, especially for larger screens.

I'm not sure that there is a "best" for all situations but rather, like with everything else in life, it's just a matter of design decision trade-offs. Longer battery life or lighter device? Better viewing angle and colour reproduction or cheaper product? Scratchable plastic or shatterable glass? Accurate stylus driven resistive or multitouch finger driven capacitive screen?

My T-Mobile myTouch 3G (aka HTC Magic, later 3.5mm Jack version) has an excellent transflective screen that's bright and clear when backlit and easily readable in direct full sunlight.

No, it isn't. It might be bright and clear when it's sidelit though.

Absolutely. Old transflective Palms were absolutely stunning displays in the bright sun too, this isn't a feat of engineering, it's just a feature of the display.

The problem is stretching the screen larger, since the distance between the sidelight and the center of the screen increases significantly, so you end up with darker patches in the center or lighter/brighter edges of the screen.

The alternative is to go with a thicker screen to allow the light to travel to the center, this works well for TVs but not nearly as well for a tablet sized device.

I wrote and meant "BACKlit" -- better transflective displays are both transmissive and reflective -- something like partially silvered mirrors

-- and work great with LED BACKlighting.

The alternative is BACKlighting, which scales very well.

p.s.

The term "transflective" means *transmissive* + reflective

which is backlit, not sidelit, otherwise the transmissive part would be pointless.

Perhaps you are thinking of frontlit/sidelit *reflective* displays, which can indeed be poor, especially the earlier ones.