Imagine being able to fold your tablet so that it fits inside your coat pocket, or your smartphone unfolding to become a smartphone/tablet hybrid. Manufacturers of smartphones and tablets are pursuing the idea of flexible smartphones and tablets, with the aim to develop next generation devices.
Flexible displays have in fact been around for a while, with three main versions emerging: electronic ink, Gyricon, and OLED. These displays permit the user to simply roll them up or fold them to minimise their storage space.
Gyricon is essentially a double sided sheet of plastic, similar to the thickness of a transparency. Between these sheets are millions of tiny electrically charged balls, made up of two colours; black and white. The balls then rotate according the electrical charge that is applied to them, with their orientation determining whether the display shows black and white or grey. Gyricon is typically found in e-readers.
Gyricon is a type of electronic paper developed at the Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center). It has many of the same properties as paper: It's flexible, contains an image, and is viewable from a wide angle, and it can be erased and written thousands of times.
Electronic ink or E-ink, is a printable ink that is stored within millions of tiny capsules. Much like the tiny balls in Gyricon, the capsules are charged and are therefore influenced by an electrical charge. The key difference with E-ink is that it can be applied to a range of flexible materials, as well as plastic.
E-ink displays consume very small amounts of energy enabling them to continue operating without a power source for months. E-ink formed a part of a recent breakthrough in the UK. An electronics manufacturer printed millions of tiny transistors onto the surface of an A4 size sheet of everyday plastic. This was then coated with a layer of E-ink to form a flexible display designed for use with smartphones. A user can store a presentation on their smartphone and then simply roll out the flexible display, connect it to their smartphone via a wireless internet connection and run their presentation, eliminating the limitation of the small screen size typical of smartphones. The manufacturers claim this will be released to the public by the start of 2013.
In a further development, Samsung have produced a flexible display which they have named ‘YOUM’. The make-up of the device is similar to that of a solid OLED screen. However the key difference is that they have replaced the glass screen with what is effectively a layer of flexible film, reducing the total thickness of the device to just 0.33mm.
But it is now the smartphones and tablets themselves that are the target of manufacturers. Hope we see flexible gadgets in near future.
