I predict
As a result of this, I predict the paperless office in about 10 years.
It sounds so promising: a "revolutionary paper tablet computer" that will completely change "the way people work with tablets and computers". Alas, the PaperTab, a concept device lauded today by "printed electronics" firm Plastic Logic, isn’t quite the gadget the company is pitching it as. PaperTab was created at Queen’s …
The technology already exists for bendy batteries (e.g. http://www.gizmag.com/bendable-thin-film-lithium-ion-battery/23656/), and it certainly exists for bendy PCBs.
Not sure about bendy chips though, but perhaps they could be made small enough to fit inside one end of the thing, and you could then roll it up?
>Until someone invents bendy chips/boards/batteries, what is the point?
It would allow devices to have a a screen twice the size of their footprint. Mobile phones have been getting bigger, in an attempt to find a compromise between being pocket-friendly yet big enough to use- but these solutions are compromises.
There have been devices such as Nintedo's newsish Gameboys, the Sony Xperia P Tablet and the aborted MS Courier that have a clamshell form-factor but with a bezel between the two screens... having a flexible display would allow a clamshell factor with no bezel.
As a rough guide, it would allow you a 6" 4:3 screen in a device the size of a 4" 16:9 smartphone (very roughly).
Besides, people are working on flexible batteries and circuit boards too!
I guess you could set up an induction loop arrangement where wireless power was broadcast to a set of these PaperTab thingies from under the desk, and use something along the lines of Bluetooth to handle their content updates. Then you'd only need a fairly tiny set of chippery on the PaperTab themselves, which might give you something like the system manufacturers are selling it as.
Of course, unless you had a mobile charger pad you could put a PaperTab on to walk around the room with (turning it into a Kindle, more or less) you'd only be able to work with the tabs at the desk.
Not convinced.
I currently have... 21 windows open on this PC, one of those is Firefox with a dozen tabs as well. And it's a fairly light day today at work and I've been quite focused in the things I'm working on. Some days there's far more than that and the pc struggles to handle it.
I can't see how having 50 paper screens scattered over my desk is going to be an improvement. I'll have to tidy them up and stack them on top of each other - which'll copy the data between them and screw everything right up!
I think there's probably a cool use case for bendy screens like this, but i don't think they've identified it yet.
Hey Jai,
No reason these things can't use tabs. Some tasks require concentration on a single screen, some tasks benefit from being able to compare two documents side by side.
Kudos to this company for considering different uses for flexible displays, and not just retrofitting them to existing devices. They could well be wide of the mark, but at least they have put the idea out there.
> I currently have... 21 windows open on this PC, one of those is Firefox with a dozen tabs ... and the pc struggles to handle it.
I'm guessing you are running some MS windows version. I have quite a bit more than that running (18 terminals, several editors, spreadsheets, word processors, database application [with multiple tabs], email/addressbook client, three VMs, Firefox and the current applications I'm working on). The PC barely notices it (current load is 0.08). If your OS can not handle multiple windows then I guess its time you upgraded your OS to something that can.
>I guess its time you upgraded your OS to something that can.
AC, "test, don't guess".
I'm not knocking Linux, but suggesting that it is a universal panacea for all IT woes is just unrealistic, and could disappoint people who follow your 'advice', potentially putting them off Linux.
If the websites he visits use Flash, he might run into problems with hardware acceleration, too.
You don't know what other applications he was running, nor did you suggest he try another browser (an easier line of enquiry than installing another OS, don't ya think?) - on older XP machines with 512 MB RAM, I find Opera more usable than Chrome, for example.
I would suggest he get more RAM, but even that can have some pitfalls, depending on his hardware setup (Intel's advice for some issues is to remove the second stick, for example) so I won't.
"I'm guessing you are running some MS windows version... If your OS can not handle multiple windows then I guess its time you upgraded your OS to something that can."
Arrogant jerks like you are part of the reason I avoid Linux - the jerk percentage of the community is too high to make being involved with it tolerable. Your post would have been obnoxious and sanctimonious even in the context of a windows/linux discussion, but to shoehorn it into a thread about display devices reminds me of the people who can't pass up any conversation about difficult times without promoting their chosen religion. Funny, that.
As if that wasn't all bad enough, you have the added double-whammy of your being utterly wrong about tech while presenting yourself as an expert on said tech! My main Windows machine happily runs Photoshop CS6, Indesign, Visual Studio, Illustrator, a dynamically-generated desktop background, several FTP applications, a dozen file manager windows, fullscreen H.264 playback, and eight or nine separate instances of Chome, each with upwards of 10 tabs, simultaneously, on six monitors, without the slightest flicker of a problem. And it hasn't been restarted in weeks.
So, in summary, you're pushy, arrogant, sanctimonious; you insulted the person you were 'giving advice' to, and, to top it off, you're wrong. And yet I suspect you wonder with a sense of personal grievance why the people you 'help' don't change (I'm sorry - 'upgrade') their OSes, thank you profusely, and send your flowers for your birthday.
How unreasonable indeed it is of the world to not see you for the helpful and benevolent bringer of Truth you really are!
Sometimes I wish that more of Richard Stallman's acolytes would behave as he does - refusing to browse the web on his own computer based on the risk of accidentally hitting a server that runs Windows, and resorting to requesting web sites to be downloaded via wget and emailed to him. Yes, I'm serious - look at his web site (Yes, he has one; he has other people maintain it since he refuses on principle.) The internet would be a much nicer place to discuss technical issues - hell, I might even give Linux another shot. Until then...
If you're basing your OS choice on who is a jerk in what community, you're doing it wrong.
Yes the Linux "community" has jerks, just like the Apple "community", the Unix "community" and *shock* *horror* the Windows "community".
Every "community" has it's fair share of arrogant jerks - including El Reg. Whatever OS you choose to go with*, go with it for it's technical merits and the support you get, not because there's a few chair-throwing, lawyer-upping, dev-bashing jerks advocating it.
*Also applies to life in general.
As well as being an annoying arse, our anonymous Coward is also a bit of a liar. I present two quotes to you. From the OP we have:
I currently have... 21 windows open on this PC, one of those is Firefox with a dozen tabs as well. And it's a fairly light day today at work and I've been quite focused in the things I'm working on. Some days there's far more than that and the pc struggles to handle it.
And from the cut'n'paste job of our Windows-bashing idiot we have:
> I currently have... 21 windows open on this PC, one of those is Firefox with a dozen tabs ... and the pc struggles to handle it.
Notice the rather crucial difference?
I'm never quite sure when to ignore trolls and when to respond. Partly because you're never sure with the anonymous ones whether they're trolls or tools. You get to learn by experience with the named ones.
I guess with misquoting skills like that, they should be able to get a job with the Today Program on Radio 4, or most newspapers.
one issue with the AC's advise too - ignoring that this is an old, underspecced work pc which is tightly locked down preventing the possibility of installing an alternative web browser, let alone a new OS - if i did switch to his preferred OS, i'd need to look for a new job, as we run a lot of proprietary software, written many years ago, no doubt highly inefficient and the main reason for the poor performance, which may or may not run under emulation in something like wine but regardless, there is neither the budget nor resources to fully regression test and prove that. which is why we're still running everything under WinXP and only recently purchased servers run anything as new as WinServer2008!
the other issue is, i am, to use the parlance of someone posting above, a mac jerk, so if i was going to be switching OS's here at work, it wouldn't be in the direction of the penguin-botherers.
Sod it - anyone seen my bendy screen? I swear I left it right on my desk on top of that pile of bendy screens, next to the pile of bendy screens for filing and the other pile of miscellaneous bendy screens I haven't had time to look at yet.
Some of these scientist johnnies obviously never had a proper job in an office in the eighties.
The B/W Kindle is NOT dead. People who want to READ are still buying them. The Kindle fire and its ilk are not really e-readers as much as they are general content devices, and do not provide the level of reading comfort and clarity. (Or the low cost and extreme battery life.)
I use a tablet AND a Kindle. Serious reading on an LCD is just not as good .
Now e-ink for what this video is showing on the other hand is just silly.
Does anyone understand the concept of tech demo? The cables are there because the research is to make a bendy screen, not to make a full final product. e-ink displays need very little power, eventually the electronics/battery could go along one edge, inductively charged. Most of the pieces to do it exist in some form, except for the actual flexible display, which was the whole point of the demo.
I don't think this would replace a big screen for me, but as extra displays that I can take the PDF I want to read while laid back on the chair, or as a great way to keep working notes that I can still cut and paste to my main workspace, I think this will be a great thing when it matures.
No point in a bendy screen if you need the rest of the components that are not bendy - not sure how safe a bendy battery would be and a CPU? It is going to be a touch device - if not it's pretty far behind the market now.
When you look at something like an 10" iPad (or Android equivalent) you can see that is the future a lot more than this trying to emulate paper which surely we are trying to get away from?
Bending like that introduces repetitive stresses along common lines so I'd be interested in the long term test data but unlike some of the Luddites here I can see a potential future for this. The problem here is too many people are thinking of offices, homes and so on. This is the kind of tech that will find a home in various aspects of industry and possibly education too. Besides nobody would want to try to use George H. Heilmeier's first LCD but through time it ultimately lead to the LCD screens we all use today. Dismissing a technology in it's relative infancy is a foolish pastime.
Combine a bendy display to a pop armband and you have a rather nice (IMHO) phone format(s).
These things are going to be great for displaying relatively simple sets of data on top of curved surfaces, which may or may not move periodically. When these screens were first talked about, around 10 years ago, I worked as an industrial design engineer. The industrial machines I was working on had just had a 'sexy', curved cover revamp, and we seriously looked at the maturity of the tech. in order to put a simple HMI readout directly on the curved front cover, rather than having a permanently mounted monitor arm etc.
Repetitive strain and min. bend radius definitely an issue though where the panels are manually handled.
F1 teams could sell the same piece of car advertising space, multiple times, on a time share basis (weight of system allowing).
"(weight of system allowing)."
It wouldn't - nor would packaging / space requirements. And I doubt this is capable of a multiple-axis bend - which requires stretching; there are few if any radii on a modern F1 car that are 'straight' bends.
Plus, the packaging is done down to the millimeter; adding even the slightest shred of weight or thickness would be suicide.
That and the fact that the teams are required by the FIA to run the same livery each race...
Might work for touring cars, though.
>How about some bendable spoons?
My baby nephew has one... silicone I think, so that whilst being spoon-fed there is no danger of bashing his milk-teeth should he decide to shift his head.
Larger flexible spoons, again silicone, are used for cooking, in particular for scraping the last of the sauce from the bottom of the pan.
I would love to have one of these in A0 size that I can put into a standard roll for posters, so I can show off my image and 3D medical volume processing and visualization algorithms on the poster itself. That would be seriously cool. All I would need is to hook it up to the laptop (for the required computational oomph) as a huge external screen. You could even support touch-based interaction.
I could even remove any typos I left, or let viewers supply their own images
New gestures:
To delete the current file, scrumple up screen and toss in recycling bin.
To shred the current file, rip screen in half or set light to it
To archive current file, spike on sharp vertical spike on desk (HSE's nightmare)
To e-mail current file, folder screen, put in in envelope and hand deliver to recipient
To decrypt current file, soak screen in benzene and hold over a light source
...
These are ideal to replace those posters people stick on round posts (e.g. Missing Cat), or even proper adverts on round columns. Another use could be wearable screens on t-shirts (or even inside jackets). OR, if they made them big enough (and colour, etc) they could start to replace large projection screens where a curve is preferable...
OR just roll it up and make an interactive kaleidoscope
Just a thought or two
Rather than tacked on top (I haven't forgotten the PoS that was Pen Windows).
Although I'm thinking someone has read "The Diamond Age," along with Xerox's work on "plaques."
The problem as always with PL's stuff is the price. You've now got multiple laptops on your desk. The price/sheet would have to drop drastically. Which might work if PL's idea worked out.
There might be a way to make this work out if the sheets become wireless peripherals of small format PC running this interface. The sheets retain the last thing sent to them on the screen.
Now what happens if part of that image is an icon for a large file? Where does is the underlying item kept and if you were to tap your sheet to a colleagues how would it be transferred? Now what if it was A.N. Random's sheet in another country? How does that work.
Thumbs up for the UI.
Sony did this 5 years ago!
Youtube video of OLED flexible screen
And this at least 2 years ago (according to youtube upload date)
Youtube video of rollable display
So WTF! where's my bendable screen?
It only needs a 10mm bend radius and we're done.
http://www.flashfilmworks.com/MovieGuide/RedPlanet/red06.jpg
It won't get scratched in your pocket and the electronics to drive it can all be rigid and bunged in the end. Even if it just wrapped round the device, that would be almost as good and leave more space for other stuff.
On a side note, the Carpica vision of e-paper has totally jaded me :(
Branded IBM, I note, just like the tablets in 2001 A Space Odyssey.
Was it Red Planet that had really quite stupid 'scientists' before Prometheus made them mainstream, or was that Mission to Mars? I get them confused.
Lt Ripley: Did IQs just drop sharply while I was away?