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Cellphones

Folding Screen For Mobile Phones Unveiled 54

sumj sends in word out of a Taiwanese research institute of a folding display on a smartphone that allows its screen to double in size to 5 inches (slideshow here). It's a prototype at this point. Don't bother clicking for the article's second page — it's one sentence with an interstitial before.
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Folding Screen For Mobile Phones Unveiled

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  • Right... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 28, 2008 @09:25AM (#25915709)

    Look mommy! I did some brake-through R&D!

    "But Timmy boy, it's just a 3d model!"

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Look mommy! I can't spell "breakthrough"!

    • it looks like a physical mockup, not a 3D render. most publicity/promo photos are cleaned up a fair bit to give them an unrealistically "perfect" look, but these are pretty clearly touched up photos rather than 3D renders.

      and if you go to the Pilotfish [pilotfish.eu] website, you'll see that these publicity shots are exactly the same look/feel as those of their other products (which have already been released).

      but no doubt there'll still be some paranoid arm-chair digital imaging experts screaming "fake!" or "photoshopped

  • Don't bother... (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Don't bother clicking for the article's first page.

    It's just renders, not even a prototype.

    • by SIR_Taco ( 467460 ) on Friday November 28, 2008 @09:48AM (#25915871) Homepage

      Your making a suggestion not to RTFA?
      That should just be implied around here.
      You're new here aren't you?!

    • Re:Don't bother... (Score:4, Informative)

      by mobby_6kl ( 668092 ) on Friday November 28, 2008 @01:16PM (#25917363)

      Click here [youtube.com] instead. Here's another version [youtube.com]. This video's pretty shitty in terms of both visual quality and cinematography, but at least it seems legit. It shows Samsung's foldable OLED scren prototype, built into a smartphone-ish form factor. I don't recall any specifics, and unfortunately searching for it just returns a bunch of identical blog posts.

      The concept is pretty exciting, but can't help but wonder about the durability of this thing, the regular wiring in the laptop screens seems to fail due to folding often enough as it is.

    • by Dan541 ( 1032000 )

      Click on an Article Link?

      Why the hell would I do that?

  • Looks a bit like... (Score:5, Informative)

    by FreakCERS ( 517467 ) <cers@geeksbyna[ ]e.dk ['tur' in gap]> on Friday November 28, 2008 @09:37AM (#25915811) Homepage
    .. the one samsung displayed not too long ago: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2SCZvU8sGU [youtube.com]
  • Now, was I the only one excited and then let down because speedread left though title left me with "Cool, Folding@home@mobile phones".

    Shame.

    • Dude, read slower; type slower.

      did you mean...

      Was I the only one first excited and then let down after speedreading through the title? Because it left me with, "Cool, Folding@home mobile phones".

    • I'd really like to know why the idea of running CPU-intensive computations on your mobile phone would excite you in the first place. Devices with relatively slow CPUs running from relatively limited power sources doesn't seem to be ideal platform for distributed computing applications...

  • In other news, trailers of a new, to-be released Sci-fi movie has hit the theatres in Taiwan.

    "Honey, I Flexed my iPhone!"
  • I made it out of some christmas lights and and old Delorean.
    Does it do anything..well not really.

  • Don't bother clicking for the article's second page -- it's one sentence with an interstitial before.

    kdawson's trying to prove he reads the articles before posting them!

    • Apparently still not showing much judgment in whether to run a story.

      It's not really a folding screen anyway like flexible paper. It uses two borderless screens connected with a thin hinge. If you're going to show off a render, might as well make the panel itself fold.

  • http://harns.blogspot.com/2008/07/additional-smartphone-screen.html [blogspot.com]

    I've been talking about fold out screens for years. Why laptops don't have two thin screens is beyond me. All the technology is there.

    • by rbanffy ( 584143 )

      "Why laptops don't have two thin screens is beyond me"

      Maybe because most people would prefer a lighter laptop to a dual-screen one. You know they design this things for the majority of its public, right? They need to make a lot of them to turn a profit.

      • by geekoid ( 135745 )

        Since many corporations are moving to laptops on the desktop, and more ad more people are buying laptops for the home becasue they want something small and reasonably quite.

        If you don't do high end gaming, and don't care about updating your hardware, the laptop is the logical choice. This applies to most people.
        In fact, many new laptops can play most games, like WoW, just fine.

        Certainly there is a power issue for portability use, but if you only power the screen when the second screen is unfolded, that's no

  • Check out slide 6. Let me tell you, I'm excited.
  • Dashed hopes (Score:5, Informative)

    by Aceticon ( 140883 ) on Friday November 28, 2008 @12:41PM (#25917143)

    I was hopping for something like a roll-up OLED screen with in a bendable plastic base.

    Instead what we get is basically 2 traditional color LCD screens mounted on a swivel.

    Nothing to see here ....

  • I was hopping for something like a roll-up OLED screen with a bendable plastic base.

    Instead what we get is basically 2 traditional color LCD screens mounted on a swivel.

    Nothing to see here ....

  • but then so did my Iriver T7 Volcano in the publicity shots and I could still make something more attractive out of blu-tac.
  • Sliding screens? Yawn. I'll be impressed when they integrate a 3D hologram to project content on a PDA like that. If CNN can do it, as they demonstrated in interviews during election coverage, and Princess Leia can do it while on the run and struggling against the Empire... I mean what's the holdup?
  • I don't know anyone who watched the series (before it went downhill and we all stopped...) Earth: Final Conflict and didn't want one of those phone/PDAs. If you're unfamiliar, there was an interesting announcement to something similar much earlier this year: http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/Science-Fiction-News.asp?NewsNum=1410 [technovelgy.com] - it includes a photo of the EFC phone (opened) and acknowledges Gibson.

    The fictional EFC phone still outclasses anything I've seen dreamt-up to date.

    I couldn't find a youtube of the

    • by HTH NE1 ( 675604 )

      It's what I first thought of when seeing the story. A pity the device in Earth: Final Conflict was given such a mundane name as "a Global" without even a trademarkable variation on the spelling to allow it to be more easily referenced in popular and technical cultures. "Earth: Final Conflict Global" also doesn't roll off the tongue as easily as, say, "Star Trek Communicator"; the series-as-adjective is too long and cumbersome to say, and even fans might not pick up on "EFC Global".

      The fictional EFC phone still outclasses anything I've seen dreamt-up to date.

      Still, holding a camera on

  • "What looks like a break is actually a software taskbar similar to the one at the bottom of a PC screen. But the taskbar on the smartphone screen can be moved so the whole screen can be used for pictures, video or anything else."

    Ok...so the entire story is about a screen that can be folded without having a break, and the only picture provided of said screen contains a line that had to be excused...?
  • ...unfortunately it doesn't show anything.

Every nonzero finite dimensional inner product space has an orthonormal basis. It makes sense, when you don't think about it.

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