First Mobile Device with Rollable Display

TC writes "Telecom Italia and Polymer Vision today [February 5, 2007] announced an agreement which will see the leading operator of the Italian mobile industry and the pioneers of the rollable display industry join to develop and launch the world's first rollable display enabled mobile device to market in 2007. After seven years of gestation it seems that E Ink is coming of age."

Too bad.

[Aladrin]

This is a really neat device. It's too bad the company is so stupid.

It's completely locked down by DRM. The ONLY books it'll read have to be bought from them.

It's only marketed in Italy. Holy cow... That's awful short-sighted.

The webpage there is also riddled with stupid comments like 'display larger than the handset itself' ... Paradox? No, just stupidity. They mean larger than the handheld when in storage form.

Software

[Hiween]

I wonder about the software in the device. From the article I understand that content "can be delivered and bought through TIMs mobile network via a regular SIM Card within the device". This may screw up the device, not only because the provider can ask for insane amount of money for the service, but because it may not have what I want to read. I guess most popular newspapers will be there, but what about PDFs I download from the net?, what if I have a Safari account that allows me to download books in PDF format?

Too many instances!

[AikonMGB]

I don't know about you, but after reading the first two paragraphs my brain started to asplode...

declare @num int
SELECT @num = count(1) FROM article WHERE text LIKE '%rollable display%'

Arithmetic overflow error converting expression to data type int.

On a more serious note, its about time.. although the article is rather scant on details, the device looks like a quite acceptable first-generation portable information booklet. Next time I want to see the display actually roll up into a cylinder, without the need for a hard-plastic backing to support it.. maybe some kind of electro-sensitive memory strands that can make it stiff or pliable on demand?

Good idea, maybe will pass onto other devices.

[danpsmith]

Everyone seems to be complaining about the company involved, but I see this as a revolutionary development. The problem I've always had with tiny devices is tiny screens. It's great to have the ability to surf the web on your phone, but why bother when you got a 1"x1" little screen and have to squint the whole time. Watching movies on a 1.5"LCD just isn't really that attractive. With something like this applied more in the industry you could fold out your display when you are sitting about, fold it up when you need to move and never miss a step. Could be a great development for lots of mobile uses. Even if this model and company don't pan out, as long as the product makes it to market and wows a couple of people, it could indicate a trend that could expand into further possibilities, which is always a good thing.

Cool, but ....

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks to be a very cool device. As far as I'm concerned though, it needs two additional things to make me want to purchase it over the iphone. First is the most obvious I think, which is color. Heck, I might even live with a 256 grey scale, but color is a definite must. Second, is a way to either show part of the display while in the closed position or to have a secondary display. Having a second display would rock as you could separate the phone functions from it's other duties, or place controls on the smaller display while reserving the larger display for content.

It already happened

[Henry V .009]

E-Ink finally coming of age? I just finished reading the new Dan Simmons novel on my E-Ink Sony Reader, thank you very much.

Re:Too bad.

[Mateo_LeFou]

Actually, I like that it's only marketed in Italy. That means someone could (and should) get one, bring it to the states, reverse-engineer the DRM off of it, and publish a HOWTO so we can all use these things to access whatever books we want. If telecom isn't selling the thing here, I don't think you can SLAPP that kind of activity down. (IANAL, just thinking aloud)

How does this compare to...

[skeftomai]

...OLED? And is OLED ever even going to actually come out?

Re:It already happened

[Henry V .009]

I have the money, and did a lot of reading on my Ebookwise 1150. I thought the nicer display would be worth it. The software is the only downside, but as long as you've got a tool that can convert any format into rtf, it's good enough. If you're interested in something cheaper, then by all means, the Ebookwise is the way to go. The LCD screen isn't all that bad.

Nature's End

[lazarus]

Score another one for sci-fi. The first reference to this kind of technology I came into was a book called "Nature's End" [amazon.com] by Whitley Strieber and James Kunetka which was published in 1986. The protagonist used a rolled-up display on a portable computer called an IBM "AXE" if I remember correctly (was a long time ago).

Reading through the book summary today gives me something of a deja-vu (on the heels of the UN report on the environment):

"The authors of the best seller ... depict in powerful detail a 21st-century Earth with devastated environment and rampant overpopulation. A rich and comfortable elite coexists with malnourished, pitiful billions, "the victim generation." The rich enjoy youth preservation treatments and other biomedical wonders while the rest just endure the toxicity and pollution."

The book was set in 2025. A deal today at $0.20!

More fuel...

[Falladir]

"While smaller than a typical mobile phone..."

Does this claim look foolish to anyone? Sure, this is smaller than the Nokia "brick" phones we used to carry around in the late 90s. I'm not living in any kind of wealthy community, and practically all the cell phones flip open. They're significantly smaller than the device pictured in the article

Re:It already happened

[Anonymous Coward]

$350 is only about 20 trade paperbacks / cheap hardcovers or 35 paperbacks. With the entire project gutenburg collection available for free (and the device unDRMed enough that Sony will let you read .rtf files (nicely) or .pdf files (badly) on it), I figured that I could "make" my money back, or at least get my money's worth. Love Baen's science fiction, and it is around $9 for a paperback, but $3-4 for the eBooks if you buy them in WebScriptions form (plus they have 50-60 books for free). Never liked reading on the computer or laptop, and don't have a PDA. So, to me it has been worth it. The real tipping point was when I found I could get the Borders Rewards $10 off, $50 of free eBooks (before Jan 1, 2007), and apply my Borders holiday credit towards it. The display is great, very much like reading a book when you're in good light, and I figured that with the $45 two-year accident protection plan, I'd be able to read enough on it to make it "worth" it in some financial sense, even if I choose not to illegally download a single book; I've illegally downloaded many books that I own physically, and already re-read a couple favourites on the Reader, so that's an (illegal but morally non-reprehensible) bonus.

Re:Wait a minute...

[plover]

Really old CRTs and LCDs only had one cell per pixel, for grayscale.

No, Fairly old CRTs and LCDs only had one cell per pixel, for grayscale. Really old LCDs had seven segments per digit. Really old CRTs were character oriented, and you had no control over individual pixels (back when ASCII art was the height of computer graphics.) Ancient CRTs were vector oriented storage scopes, allowing you to draw lines, but not erase them without erasing the entire display.

You kids these days and your fancy bitmapped screens.

Yawn...

[Greyfox]

Waiting for a ball-point pen sized device with one of these. [io2technology.com] Bah. Roll-out display. That's so 20th century thinking...