I had one of the qualcomm toqs (which used a small mirasol display).
It didn't look that much better (or distinguishable, for the matter) than one of those reflective LCDs (e.g. Pebble's). And reflective "memory" LCDs also have almost negligible -- though not zero -- power consumption. Except for maybe signage products most people don't care about this difference, and LCD is way cheaper and mainstream, so...
It's no surprise that many manufacturers just put an LCD and try to get away by calling it "ePaper". There is a lot of geek appeal here, but I'm not really sure if we really need any new technology for "mainstream".
Also had a Toq. Probably one of my favorite smartwatches, and would have loved to see it live long enough to run Android Wear. Unfortunately, Qualcomm isn't a product company and the Toq was essentially a proof of concept for both Mirasol and their new (at the time) line of smartwatch-focused Snapdragon chips. They managed to convince most of the major real smartwatch OEMs to use Snapdragon but the Mirasol just never got off the ground. Apparently manufacturing was very difficult, as you might imagine, and they were hitting limitations on pushing the color depth.
It didn't look that much better (or distinguishable, for the matter) than one of those reflective LCDs (e.g. Pebble's). And reflective "memory" LCDs also have almost negligible -- though not zero -- power consumption. Except for maybe signage products most people don't care about this difference, and LCD is way cheaper and mainstream, so...
It's no surprise that many manufacturers just put an LCD and try to get away by calling it "ePaper". There is a lot of geek appeal here, but I'm not really sure if we really need any new technology for "mainstream".