New Mobile Phone Has a Foldable Screen (NewsFactor)

If mobile phones are getting too small for your fingers or eyes, a Dutch company called Polymer Vision has a unique solution. It announced a phone with a foldable screen that offers a display larger than the device itself.

Called Readius, the device has a five-inch, black-and-white display that unfolds and folds. The screen can display only 16 shades of gray, but the company says it is twice the surface area of the largest mobile-phone display. When closed, the device is the size of an average mobile phone.

Polymer Vision is a spinoff from electronics giant Philips, and the Readius will be available by the middle of this year. No price has been announced.

NEW MOBILE-PHONE CATEGORY

Polymer said the Readius introduces a "whole new mobile-phone category," combining the "reading friendly strengths of e-readers with the high mobility features of mobile phones." The Readius can run for up to 30 hours on a single battery, is a HSDPA tri-band phone with standard POP3 and IMAP support for e-mail, and has microSD High Capacity storage.

Users do not want to deal with problems that result from the small device-versus-screen size tradeoff, said Polymer CEO Karl McGoldrick in a statement. Such devices have either small screens or are too bulky to carry in a pocket, he said.

To solve the problem, Philips spent years working on foldable displays. In 2002, after more than 10 years of research into what it called organic electronics, Philips announced the worlds first flexible display. In 2004, Polymer, which was then part of Philips, announced the first rollable display that was as thin as paper. The first prototype of the Readius was presented in 2005.

VERY INNOVATIVE DEVICE

Chris Hazelton, an analyst at industry research firm IDC, remembers when the prototype was announced. "It sounds like a very innovative device," he said, adding that he had not yet seen it. A foldable-screen phone could indeed represent a new category, he agreed, but it needs to be "pretty rugged" to sustain wear and tear and to protect the screen when its folded.

Hazelton said the Readius is the only foldable-screen phone he knows of, but "if it can stand up to 18 months or more of use," it might catch on as a browser-oriented device. Even though its only monochromatic, he said, it could be attractive as an information-retrieving device for the Web.

Some observers are suggesting that the Readius could compete not only with phones, but also with such new devices as Amazons electronic book reader, the Kindle. But instead of updating its e-book content through its wireless connection, as Kindle does, the Readius updates its content through a computer.

Hazelton noted that morphing devices such as the Readius, in which the device changes to support a users activity, are becoming more common. Morphing devices also include sliding screens, sliding keyboards, context-sensitive interfaces and other adapting features.