Plastic screen outfit teams with Epson to offer screen on your plastic

Re: Popular with consumers? Yes

I'm sure you're right about the 'user experience' with a credit card but we can consider other forms of personal card that might benefit from similar psychology.

Consider supermarket or shop chain loyalty/points cards. If the shopper had a card with a displayed balance that increased after every shopping experience, that would make them feel good about having just spent money. (Yes, I know it's pathetic but many people are like that and they look forward to using their points to buy Christmas gifts, etc. I can cite most of my family as examples.)

Re: Popular with consumers? Yes

Don't show the balance. Show how much credit limit you have left. It will get some people to spend up to their credit limit.

Re: Pretty much what you'd need...

Does it? How do you (and the other party) know the amount displayed is the actual amount available on the card? And cards like you propose will need POS equipment just like the current bank cards and debet/credit cards, equipment that has to be certified and maintained.

Re: Supermarket shelves

If it's similar to the products I've worked with, the device power and data comms run through a convenient track rail on the edge of the shelf. LCD displays need continuous power anyway, so may as well shove data along at the same time and there are plenty of off the shelf protocol implementations for single wire comms involving multiple devices on a single data bus. The smarter ones even have full two way comms so the target device can acknowledge receipt and operation of the data received and a heartbeat function is usually implemented as well. Both of these should be almost required for remote price display functions in a supermarket.

A plastic display or e-ink display could bring the price down and produce a more legible display for the end user - i.e. a wide range of eyesight toting shoppers.

Re: Supermarket shelves

"I thought it was a bit of an overengineered solution but they must have found some benefit to warrant rolling it out."

The "nice" thing about these is that you can adjust your prices on the fly then, basically liquid supply&demand optimization. Some people are thinking this is a great idea.

Re: a screen I can trust

Moving the display and keypad wouldn't stop these attacks, but just change their nature a little.

I don't know about plastic logic but I do know a bit about irex

I own an illiad and I'm sorry to say its software is complete and utter crap. As is the user interface. The basic things are really only basic and are not at all written with overcoming the limitations of the hardware in mind.

For example, rendering a PDF page takes a good few seconds. So I skip to the next page, and I have to wait. I skip back, I have to wait again. Well more than the delay the screen imposes. Despite the thing having enough memory to cache the last few rendered pages, it just doesn't. Neither does it pre-render in some low-powered fashion the next page while I'm reading this page, and yet its battery life is measured in hours, not page-turns.

There are a number of other things like that where they dropped the ball, including the hardware. Like how the screen developed a dead line three weeks after I'd bought it (second-hand for a third of list or so, still too much), by which time they'd already gone bust. There still were support sites up, but after they'd made you register and login, they took your complaint then just pointed to other sites and never ever answered. Now it's not entirely surpising they weren't providing support after going bust, but they didn't clean up after themselves either. They raised expectations and didn't live up to them. And apparently when they weren't bust yet they had to replace a lot of broken displays under warranty, as (I found out too late) it is a common problem. The entire thing has a fairly amateurish smell to it, for an unjustifyably high price tag.

Maybe they thought that branding the thing "enterprise" would be enough to gloss over the deficiencies, and they bet pretty heavily on electronic delivery deals as they did with a national "quality" (and struggling) broadsheet. Not the most solid of moves, judging by the results.

As I said I don't know about plastic logic except that I really didn't see their devices next to the various other e-ink e-reader brands that you also don't see much of these days. It's a pity, really, because I fully agree the technology is neat and probably a good fit, but, well, it's now thoroughly out-shined by tablets. So much more's the pity.

Re: Seems problematic

Provded you want it (I most definitely don't) it could retrieve your account balance every time you use one of $YOURBANK's cash dispensers; it could even be a function separate from pulling coloured bits of paper from the thing, just like them having an option to show your balance on screen.

If we're going there...

... we'll just have to solve it somehow. Encrypted pager-like transmissions with everybody's bank balances, for example.

But why would you? One of the things that make chip&pin dangerous for the card holder is that it exposes the entire bank balance every time you use the card. Overlook an extra digit in the terminal and poof, there you go. It's also part of what makes skimming so lucrative.

The problem with various cash replacements are equally varied, but among them notably that they're one-way streets for your hard-earned: You can't just put cash in and then take it out again. Often you have to go through your banking account to put credit in, creating paper trail, and to take out, well, you basically only can purchase something, not just convert it back to cash. Some systems (eg the Dutch PT card with its many many broken promises) even only let you take credit out by sending it to your (and only your) bank account and taking a hefty penalty fee, paper(!) forms and a multi-week wait to discourage the practice.

But if you make the card a simple electronic credit holder thing instead of a(n irreplacable!) token proxing for something else again, you can easily count everything that goes in and everything that goes out. And then you could just show it on a display built into the card. Easily.