Phone With Folding Screen

[engine]

A Dutch company has squeezed a display the size of two business cards into a gadget no bigger than other mobile phones -- by making a screen that folds up when not in use.

The 5-inch (13-cm) display of Polymer Vision's "Readius" is the world's first that folds out when the user wants to read news, blogs or email and folds back together so that the device can fit into a pocket.

Phone With Folding Screen [reuters.com]

Neat!

I can't wait to see one.

[jtara]

Unfortunately, though, it's of very limited use.

The problem is not the display - it's the software.

It's a "widget concept". You select widgets from a website (while sitting at your home computer). The widgets will appear on the phone.

There's no ability to browse the web from the phone. You can only view pre-selected widgets.

This started out life as a portable book reader. Along comes the Amazon reader, and now it's been recycled into a phone...

[rogerd]

A true folding screen would be a huge boon to pocket devices. A huge problem for PDAs being used as Web browsers, book readers, etc. is that the screen is too small, even when it stretches to the physical edge of the device. Taking a screen beyond the pocketable dimensions of the device would be really big.