Not Your Grandpa's PDA

Wouldn't it be great if you never had to use paper ever again? Everything on dynamic screens that would be able to change content in a split second. Stacks of documents, books, magazines, pamphlets, photos reduced to the size of a memory chip. Well, I guess that kind of technology has been around for a while, but your going to need to get to the information when your not sitting in front of your computer right? PDA's are nice, but with the convenience lies a dilemma. Make it smaller and your reading on a 3 inch screen. Make it larger and its not much more convenient than hauling your PC around with you. Well very recently, Philips Polymer Vision has been showing off the early stages of their rollable mobile device display, the PV-QML5.

This is a 5 inch 320x240 display, when not in use, can be rolled up to a curvature radius of 7.5mm. It can display 4 levels of monochrome gray and has a 10:1 contrast ratio making it easy to read even in bright daylight conditions. Using technology developed by E Ink Corp. like the Sony Libre it is also capable of displaying detailed images as well as just text. Philips has said this technology will be going into production within the next two years.

A prototype called the "Readius" using one of these PV-QML5 displays will be shown at the Internationale Funkausstellung consumer electronics show in Berlin later this week.


The possibilities for this type of thing are crazy. What if it had a touch screen? Its an exciting time for technology, but sometimes I wish I was born 50 years later because most of this computer based technology is still in its extreme infancy. All I can do for now is spend all my money on crazy gadgets, in hopes of further funding the development of even more crazy gadgets. Its a vicious and never ending cycle. Who am I to fight it?

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