Qualcomm's Mirasol displays - no backlight required!

While meeting with chip manufactuerer Qualcomm today at Mobile World Congress, we took a few moments to stop fawning over the company's latest Snapdragon processors to take a look at what I consider to be possibly the coolest piece of tech I've seen here in Barcelona this year.

What caught my eye, most literally, were Qualcomm's interferometric modulation (IMOD) Mirasol displays. The displays use light interference to create colors on a very paper-like display surface. The displays look somewhat like how you would imagine a color version of the Amazon Kindle's electronic-ink display to appear. The selling point for the new technology is that it requires no backlight at all, and can save significant amounts of power over traditional backlit TFT^(INFO) LCD displays or even the newer AMOLED^(INFO) technology used by devices like the Google Nexus One.

Qualcomm invested in Mirasol some time ago and has since bought out the company. We were told by company reps that we should see the displays in retail devices by the end of the year.

A color Kindle, anyone?

In any case, check out the display in action in our video. You can read more on Qualcomm's IMOD technology at the Mirasol website.