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Flexible e-readers said to be years off
January 17, 2010 | 7:05 pm
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By David Rothman
Now that you’re excited about the Asus color display allowing a claimed 122 hours of battery life, here’s something different—to cool you down.
Fully flexible e-readers, which you can handle like your morning newspaper, are apparently years off. Newspaper-flexible screens themselves may take three to five years to go on sale.
At least that’s the opinion of Nicholas Colaneri, director of the Flexible Display Center at Arizona State University. The issue isn’t just the flexibility of the screens, he says, but also of the other guts of the readers. Of course, even without the entire devices being flexible, the flexi screens would still have the plus of being more rugged than LCDs or current E Ink displays. In fact, some existing screens in devices like the Skiff do have some flexibility, but not as much as an old-fashioned newspaper.
Image is of a Sony flexible display.
Related: LG Display to develop its 19-inch flexible electronic-paper screen (via the New York Times). Yep, the experimental models are a lot bigger now than the one in the photo.
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Comments:
I’m a little confused. The Plastic Logic Que and the Skiff both have bendy screens as demonstrated at CES; it’s their housing that makes them stiff. I can imagine there’s a lot of difficulty in making the housing flexible too, considering touch screen technology, batteries, and so on, but to claim the screens aren’t even there when there’s plastic and metal-foil screens already on the market seems, well, odd.
N: I think the issue is, How flexible. Presumably not p-newspaper flexible. I’ll tweak the past to note that some existing displays do have some flexibility. Thanks for caring about the nuances. David