2025

TCL’s bet on screens that look like paper

Since 2021, TCL has been investing in an intriguing screen technology called NXTPAPER: an LCD panel that attempts to simulate paper to be less harsh on human eyes. As someone who spends more time than recommended looking at screens, this greatly interests me.

The Chinese manufacturer announced a new version at CES 2025, called NXTPAPER 4.0. It brings a “significant advancement” in the weak point of previous versions, (low) brightness, thanks to a “sophisticated nano-matrix lithography technology”.

I don’t know what this means, but it seems to have yielded results. The screen of the Tablet 11 Plus, one of the devices with NXTPAPER 4.0 announced, reaches up to 550 nits. This value doesn’t compare to the best traditional screens, but it should be readable.

In addition to the tablet (still without price or release date), TCL also announced a phone, the TCL 60 XE NXTPAPER 5G. (Good name, marketing folks.) Both tablet and phone have an “NXTPAPER Key” that toggles between conventional mode and “Max Ink Mode,” which, according to TCL, “turns the display into an e-ink format designed to reduce eye strain and ensure maximum eye comfort.”

When activated, Max Ink Mode also disables notifications and adds a super nice side effect that I’ll only believe when I see it: a huge increase in battery life, up to 7 days of reading and 26 days (!) on standby. It will be released first in Canada, in May, for USD 199.

The rest of the 60 XE phone’s specifications seem decent, a level above those of its predecessor that Marques Brownlee tested, liked, but not enough to recommend it.

Some videos show the “NXTPAPER Key” and “Max Ink Mode” in action. TCL made a clip (13min) of the section where they discussed mobile devices in their CES presentation and made it available on YouTube.

While E-Ink (company) tries to make its screen technology (the one used in Kindle) faster, some manufacturers have been betting on the same approach as TCL and are trying to make conventional screens more eye-friendly. The startup Daylight launched an (expensive) tablet in 2024 with an even more aggressive proposal — black and white LCD panel, similar to those of calculators.

Meta’s moderation policy dismantling will hurt, but it can be good in the long run

Meta’s announcement on Tuesday (7th) that, among other actions, it will end partnerships with fact-checking agencies in the US, replacing them with “community notes,” and relax restrictions on certain types of content, has alarmed many people.

In a somewhat convoluted way and not without causing damage, this might lead to a good outcome (for us) in the long run.

If we take X (former Twitter) as an example, the relaxation of moderation there accelerated the discarding of Elon Musk’s platform as a habitable place, leading to losses in revenue, users, and relevance in public debate.

It would be great if this were repeated with Instagram, Facebook, and Threads. Even if so, we will have to deal with three inevitable and worrying consequences:

  1. Targeted campaigns of hate, harassment, and the occurrence of crimes (as considered outside of the US, such as racism and homophobia in Brazil) are likely to increase. It will be up to the police and the judiciary to increase their attention and be quicker in their actions to mitigate the damage.
  2. Fact-checking agencies will suffer a financial blow. Meta is the largest funder of many of them; some were created solely or primarily to act in the company’s program.
  3. Mark Zuckerberg’s boot-licking Trump, combined with an explicit threat to the sovereignty of Latin American justice and European legislation by Joel Kaplan, Meta’s vice-president of global affairs, could have serious systemic effects, such as on commercial and diplomatic relations and tariff policies between those countries and the US.

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It would be naive to expect a mass exodus of users from Meta’s platforms in response to the dismantling of moderation, although searches for deleting accounts increased sharply. Less naive would be to witness a more incisive reaction from governments and companies committed to values opposed to those made explicit by Meta’s leadership.

How about abandoning their presence on Instagram and Facebook or, at the very least, stopping injecting money into Meta’s advertising engine? If Meta’s business is to dominate our attention, nothing hurts the company more than ignoring it.

On an individual level, abandoning ship is a more difficult, less obvious decision. I should keep my Instagram account — it’s where loved ones post updates — and I won’t block Threads on the fediverse, although I don’t condemn or criticize those who do/will do so. That crowd of “preventive fediblock” to Threads had some reason.