A two-sentence story by Rodney Chan appeared in DigiTimes this morning. The story was not treated as if DigiTimes’ editors thought it was important and the story was easy to overlook, but there may be a bit more here than meets the eye. This is the story in its entirety:

Ken Werner
Senior Analyst and Editor
of HDTV Retailer &
Mobile Display Report

PVI Delays Shipments of Electronic Paper

Prime View International (PVI) will postpone its shipments of electronic paper to the third quarter since a client has rescheduled a product launch, according to the Chinese-language Commercial Times. PVI, which originally planned to start shipping electronic paper in volume in the second quarter, is looking to generate NT$1-1.5 billion (US$30.58-45.87 million) in revenues from electronic paper, the newspaper reported.

What could make this story more interesting than it appears is that PVI is Qualcomm’s manufacturing partner for making Qualcomm’s innovative iMoD interferometric reflective displays. (The two-color Bichrome version is shown in the photo.) The iMoD certainly qualifies as an ePaper display, and PVI has inserted a Qualcomm-made MEMS manufacturing module into its manufacturing line to make iMoD displays.

If we assume it’s unlikely that PVI is working on more than one major ePaper program, this little Commercial Times story gives us an indication of when Qualcomm will begin its initial roll-out of the display. According to unconfirmed rumors heard at SID in early June, initial quantities will be about 15K per month - barely sample quantities for a cell-phone industry that produces nearly a billion units per year. But it’s an interesting start for a novel display technology that can deliver bright, sunlight-readable, very low-power secondary displays for mobile handsets.