Recently, there has been a trend of add-on displays that magnetically attach to the back of your phone. Normally, they are used as preview displays for the camera, but Honor is going another way – what if your phone could carry an ebook reader?
The Honor Life S3 is a tiny reader – it has a 3.68” e-ink display with 259ppi pixel density. The whole thing measures 5.6mm thick and weighs 61g. It snaps on the back of your phone with magnets – if your phone or case doesn’t already have magnets, the retail package for the S3 includes a magnetic ring (plus a screen protector and a charging cable).
Honor Life S3, a tiny ebook reader that attaches to the back of your phone
The device has a small 650mAh battery, but e-ink is so efficient that this is enough for 30 hours of continuous reading before you need to recharge the device. Charging is done via the USB-C port, by the way – it doesn’t look like there’s a way for the phone to use reverse wireless charging to top up the reader.
At least you can skip the USB cable when sending new books to the device – this is done over Wi-Fi 6 (ac) using the Honor Smart Space app on your phone. It supports the popular EPUB and MOBI book formats, as well as plain text files and even documents in the DOC, DOCX and PDF formats. There is a microSD slot with support for cards up to 1TB, so you can have an absolutely massive book collection on there.
Honor Life S3
There are two keys on the side of the Life S3 – a function key on the left and a power key on the right. However, for turning pages, you use the touchscreen. There’s no front light for the e-ink display, so you can only read in well-lit rooms or outside during the day.
Tiny ebook readers have become quite popular with devices like the Xteinkk X4 Pro. That one is a bit bigger with a 4.3” and doesn’t fit well on some smaller phones, though (see below). Xteink also has the 3.7” X3 model, which is comparable to the S3.
Xteink X4 Pro (4.3” display) hanging off the back of an iPhone 17 Pro
Anyway, the Honor Life S3 is available in China for CNY 360. This converts to $54 / £40 / €47 / ₹5,150. Would you like to see the S3 launch globally?
Honor Life S3 details (machine translated)
Source (in Chinese)