My first reaction was to scoff, but this actually improves e-readers in a few critical ways. E-ink screens have been so easy to break that they all but require a (usually) cumbersome case to survive a trip in a backpack or, say, accidentally rolling over on it in bed. This should improve that, and it sounds like the weight savings aren't negligible either. Amazing that we're close to being able to carry a library in something barely heavier than a sheet of paper. This will also make larger format readers more practical.
> According to LG, the first plastic display-toting e-readers are expected to emerge in Europe “at the beginning of next month,” with the US presumably following swiftly after.
So either they will be releasing their own device, or they already have someone wanting to use their screens. Either way, the answer to your question is "yes".
Am I the only one that doesn't understand the advantage?
I don't want paper-like e-ink displays that start to feel all "used" after a couple of days. Bending them will presumably keep them from lying flat later on. People talk about wanting to "fold" them -- and then you'll never get the creases out. And I don't want a whole book of these sheets -- for me, the whole advantage is that an e-reader doesn't need page turning!
If I had a flexible display, I would just keep it protected in a hard-backed case, thus negating the whole point. Am I missing something here?
1. It doesn't break. In the article they say it repeatedly survives 1.5m drops.
2. It's easier to fit into your bag/pocket. You don't have to fold it for that, simply bending it a just bit would help in many scenarios. Plus again, it doesn't break so you can use your back pocket for your smart phone and sit on it.
But a display by itself is useless. I'm assuming that the electronics and battery that drive the display are going to be rigid too, and will break just as easily as anything else. Or are they working on those too?
Flexible batteries and wiring exist. If the "hard" electronics like the CPU and memory were placed along one edge of such a device you could still flex, bend or roll the display portion.
It's also possible that electrically activated memory-metals could be used to "snap" such a device into a stiff rectangle when in use, but we have a way to go on those technologies yet.
Since the substrate they are using is lighter, in the short term this means lighter e-books, in the long term there's no reason we can't have portable roll-up computers like Val Kilmer had in Red Planet.
I really love e-ink, and flexible displays are a nice gimmick—but until they improve, they are still just that. I’m concerned that flexibility will encourage people to bend the display beyond its limit, rather than serve its intended purpose of insurance against accidental bending.
What I’m really looking forward to are outright foldable (yet uncreasable) display surfaces. Done reading the e-paper? Fold it up and stuff it in your bag, worry-free.
What I’m really looking forward to are outright foldable
In many ways, foldability is just the medieval substitute for a dynamic display. Instead of switching screens, you flip pages. Instead of zooming maps, you unfold the whole thing, then fold over everything except the part you're interested in.
I don't think foldability is just a medieval thing. People want screen real estate. They want to see their photos and videos in a large form factor. They also want to carry the screen in their pockets or backpacks. Foldable paper is a neat idea that achieves both. I would find it rather frustrating if I could only zoom into small parts of a map and never view the whole terrain in its 40-inches-across, 60-degrees-of-angular-diameter glory. Size matters.
Scrolling and zooming are not appropriate substitutes for folding in electronic displays. A real substitute would be a pocket-size device that can project an image of arbitrary size in mid-air, so that people can see their maps IMAX at a distance of 3 feet if they want to.
I don't think foldability is just a medieval thing.
I guess some people downvoted me because they took "Medieval" to be pejorative. I was being entirely literal. Linen-based paper was widespread in medieval Europe after the plagues. (Much of it was made of the linen clothing of people who no longer needed it, on account of their being suddenly dead.) Such paper is much more amenable to folding in the manner of a map than earlier technologies. (Though most everything seems to roll up into scrolls well enough.)
Scrolling and zooming are not appropriate substitutes for folding in electronic displays.
That's entirely contextual, as you also point out. You won't know how well things can take folding and how well the form factor performs in real life until you have such materials. Until then, we know zooming works. If I had something as light as and the same size as a clipboard that was daylight readable and yet as dynamic as an iPad, this would enable a whole other world of mobile applications that aren't quite there yet. I'm hard pressed to imagine an application I'd need that could fold out, which couldn't also be met by presentation/projection systems, or perhaps an interactive worktable form factor.
Take your maps example as a generic zooming vs. folding example. When you use something like Google Maps, if you set your browser window to show you 2cm x 2cm, would that be big enough, I doubt it. And yet your screen doesn't have to be as big as an unfolded traditional map, thanks to panning and zooming. This shows that a.) dynamic displays can reduce the need for folding but that b.) there will always be a (subjective) question of what works best.
As to a more realistic example - as a kindle reader, I wouldn't want a screen smaller than it already has, no matter how much zooming or scrolling it offers. And while the device can fit in a pocket, I generally don't like having it in one. If it was half the width and I could fold it in half, I would love that.
I like the idea of having the screen pull out link window blinds myself. Need a bigger screen for something? pull it further. Don't need a big one to read on the bus? pull it out a little. it would even give you a convineint place as a manufacturer to put the batteries, and mount the control hardware for it. It ought to be even fairly trivial to determine how much of the screen is pulled out and adjust the display accordingly.
Also people bought Tek (a digital drug) by connecting two USB-like devices to transfer credits which I assume going by the context are like cash not credit or debit cards. That's very similar to what Bitcoin is attempting, I wonder if the mysterious creator of Bitcoin was a fan of TekWar?
I guess they could make a "book" form factor with say 10 pages each made of the flexible e-ink sheets. That way you could still have a book experience and turn pages. Maybe when you get to the last page it refreshes all 10 pages for the next section of the book.
I'm not really sure if it would be useful but it would be a cool magical book.
I've heard this idea before and always thought it was silly until i saw it live.
There's a museum in Oslo (can't remember which one) that has a book like this. The book is really big, like an old school story book, and it's fixed into the table, there's maybe 10 pages. They have a projector in the ceiling above the book projecting images so they fit exactly onto the pages in the book. Each page has an invisible rfid-chip embedded in the paper so when you turn the book some sensor knows which page you have open and the projector changes page accordingly. (it also displays video and has touch-interface but that's irrelevant for this discussion). It feels magic to flip through it even though the implementation is quite trivial once you decompose it. Too bad it can't be done without having it in a fixed location.
When you are a group of people it is much easier to flip through and keeping a mental map over physical pages instead of fighting over who gets to control the scrollbar on a computer. But admittedly, it is also a bit gimmicky.
I'd like to have one physical book that becomes any virtual book.
Differing page counts and all that aside, a UI feature I like is being able to locate content based on relative location, which is especially handy when I can recall the general concept but not specific search terms.
I'm really looking forward to FOLEDs and other similar technologies, but then again I think the main problem is that nobody (as far as I know) has solved the normal wear problem.
Sure there are demos where they hit on of these film/screens with a shoe and nothing happens, but when I saw Samsung's flexible tablet video you could clearly see how the section that folded was already damaged, like an old book cover that's about to crack.
Whoever solves this is golden, high-scale manufacturing AFAIK has already been solved by HPLabs.
No, the press release is pretty slim on details (volume, price, tech). Presumably the cost/price is OK if they've begun mass production, though -- they'll be competing directly with conventional (glass) e-ink stuff to begin with, so the price will need to be comparable.
Yeah, this is just going to be used in normal ebook readers at first, until it proves its worth. We're waiting a year or two before we have rolled up displays we can stick in our pockets.
Im curious as to what you think the exciting applications are. The article mentions an ebook reader - which is one potential, although I'm not sure it will be something everyone will be clamouring for. I'm (personally) hard pressed to think of other major applications though...
But component prices are often public, and help people predict the cost of devices using the components before they are announced - so still very relevant to consumers.
