TICKEY: A Color E-Paper Card for Your Wallet Photo

By Ali Kaya

People used to carry a photo in their wallets. It was usually a passport photo or a picture of a kid, corners curled, colors a little faded, and it was there every time the wallet opened. Today the same photo sits on a phone among thousands of others, and getting to it means unlocking the screen, getting past the notifications, scrolling down through the gallery, and somewhere along the way you usually get caught on something else and forget what you were looking for.

TICKEY is trying to bring that old wallet photo into this century. It's a ticket-sized, 45-gram aluminum card with a 3.7-inch color e-paper screen on its face. You pick a picture in the phone app, send it to the card, and the picture stays on the card until you send something else.

Hanging a screen off your bag sounds, at first, like exactly the kind of nonsense this century deserves. But this screen doesn't glow, doesn't vibrate, doesn't send notifications, and isn't trying to steal anyone's attention. It just sits there, which to me is the most reasonable thing a screen can do.

The reason it can do that is e-paper. Inside the screen, electrically charged color pigments float in a liquid, and when a voltage is applied they shift around and form the image. The nice part is that once the pigments arrive where they're going, they stay there. The screen spends energy changing the picture but nothing at all keeping it, and even with the battery completely dead the picture stays where it is. And since it gives off no light, it reflects the light around it like paper does and reads easily in direct sun. It is the same trick that lets the Author Clock sit on a desk and show a line of literature all day without a glow.

According to the maker, the 360 mAh battery is good for more than 1,000 refreshes per charge under lab conditions. Run the numbers and that comes to roughly 4.8 joules per refresh, about what a phone screen burns through in five seconds. Someone who changes the picture a few times a week will probably forget where the USB-C cable is.

It doesn't make big claims about what it's for. On a bag it carries a photo or a drawing you like, and it turns into a name badge at a conference, a to-do list on a desk, a “buy bread” note on the fridge. A ring at the top clips it to a bag, the way the Kodak Charmera hangs off a key ring, a magnet on the back sticks it to the fridge, and the front plate is held on by magnets too, so you can swap it. I've always found it a little strange that the paper business card is still alive in this century, and with TICKEY, whoever taps their phone to the card gets your profile or web page opened right on their screen over NFC. It doesn't take payments and it doesn't open doors, it just hands over a link.

Color e-paper has a price, and the price is patience. A full refresh takes 13 seconds, fast mode takes 3, and the screen flashes a few times while it changes, so expecting video out of it makes no sense. The maker says it can show more than 48 colors directly, and the tones it can't show it builds by placing tiny dots of color side by side. At 720 × 480, the resolution works out to about 234 pixels per inch, so from arm's length the dots blend together and the eye sees a single color.

What actually caught my interest was the inside of the card. There's an ESP32-S3 in there, a chip hobby electronics people have been using for years, and the firmware is open source, which means the card doesn't have to stay limited to the templates in the maker's app. If it were mine I'd program it to bring a new math problem to my desk every morning, but the weather, bus times, or whatever else comes to mind is a couple of evenings' work too.

TICKEY started out as a Kickstarter campaign and drew backing for nearly 10,000 cards. The campaign's goal was a modest figure of a thousand-something dollars, and when interest went far past that, the maker split shipping in two. The first 10,000 cards are scheduled to ship in November and December 2026, the rest in the first quarter of 2027. The maker also says plainly that chip production is squeezed by AI demand and the schedule may slip, and a photo card getting delayed because of AI is one of the strangest sentences I've read this year. A single card is $59.90. I'll also remind you that backing something on Kickstarter isn't the same as buying it from a store, the money goes first and the card comes later.

Because it has physical buttons and a removable front plate, it isn't water resistant, so when the rain starts it needs to go inside the bag.