The folks at Queen’s University’s Human Media Lab are back at it again with their truly odd take on epaper prototypes.
Last year they demoed what I dubbed the ridiculously laughable PaperTab. Now they’ve got another prototype building off the same idea that they are showing off and it’s just as bizarre and unlikely to ever be produced in any shape or form as the PaperTab.
The device is called the PaperFold. It is a multi-screen, foldable smartphone that lets users add and remove screens as needed.
Here’s more from the Human Media Lab blog:
The shape-changing smartphone allows users to fold open up to three flexible electrophoretic displays to provide extra screen real estate when needed. Displays are detachable such that users can fold the device into various shapes that can range from an ultra notebook shape to a foldout map.
Each epaper display can act independently or be used as part of a single system. For instance, if you fold the device into a notebook form a keyboard appears on the bottom screen for typing. Or you can just use a single screen as a smartphone.
The screens used in the prototype are flexible epaper displays made by Plastic Logic, a company that has somehow managed to remain in the epaper industry for 14 years without actually releasing any devices that people actually use. And it doesn’t look like the PaperFold is going to change that anytime soon.
Here’s a look at an early prototype of the PaperFold multi-screen smartphone:
PaperFold: Foldable Smartphone
via: Liliputing
You clearly do not understand the difference between university research and corporate product design.
Experimental research devices like this are NOT intended to go into production as-is, and mocking them as such simply demonstrates your ignorance.
It’s disappointing that you’re narrow minded enough to laugh off these developments when you’re writing for a tech blog. Personally, I’d love to see multiscreen ebook readers for books like the A Song of Ice and Fire saga so I could view the Houses or maps side by side with the text.
If they put it on a smartphone, I’d use it while backpacking to view my maps on one side and guidebook on the other.
It’d be so much more powerful with an active digitizer so that notes could be taken on one screen with references on other screens.
Seriously, you’re kidding yourselves if you think half-cocked ideas like the PaperFold and PaperTab are ever going to amount to anything. These devices are a joke. Such bad ideas like these deserve to be mocked.
The only thing the author of this post is guilty of is wasting the time writing an article about such nonsense and then having us read it.