iPhone 5 News Blog: Revolutionary New PaperPhone Reveals A Flexible Future For Smartphones And Tablets

While the iPhone 5 News Blog is committed to reporting on iPhone news, rumor, and opinion, we also keep an eye on next-generation communication concepts that could someday put technology like the iPhone to rest. Read lead columnist Charles Moore's fascinating exposé on a new smartphone design that could put the iPhone 5 to shame — the PaperPhone!

The iPhone has been a game-changing device. just ask Apple's competitors like Research In Motion (RIM) and Nokia. And iPhones to come like the iPhone 5, iPhone 6, and beyond will be cooler yet. However, a Canadian university scientist and inventor says the thin film phone he and his team have developed will make current smartphones like the iPhone obsolete in 5 to 10 years.

The world's first interactive paper computer is set to revolutionize the world of interactive computing, according to its creator Dr. Roel Vertegaal, director of the Queen's University Human Media Lab at Kingston, Ontario, Canada, and incidentally a current iPhone user.

Could this be the smartphone that puts the iPhone5 to shame?

"This is the future," says Dr. Vertegaal, "Everything is going to look and feel like this within five years. This computer looks, feels and operates like a small sheet of interactive paper. You interact with it by bending it into a cell phone, flipping the corner to turn pages, or writing on it with a pen."

I can hardly wait.

Notwithstanding the many virtues of devices like the iPhone, iPad, other tablet computers, as well as dedicated e-readers like Amazon.com's Kindle and Barnes & Noble's Nook, in my estimation a major deficiency they all share as platforms for comfortable, relaxed reading is tactile — that rigid form factor with a plastic or metal feel. Consequently, I much prefer traditional ink-on-paper newspapers, magazines and books to e-books and other e-publishing formats. Especially when reading for pleasure. I still subscribe to a hard-copy daily newspaper, and the ink-on-paper versions of five magazines. They're more expensive than their corresponding e-editions, but I just prefer the friendly, flexible feel and heft of them.

It's partly generational I suppose. I was 40 by the time I got my first computer, and I didn't grow up reading off electronic screens. Heck, our family didn't even get its first black & white television, with reception on a whopping two broadcast channels until I was 10. Don't get me wrong. I love digital devices as powerful creative tools, communication platforms, and information access, storage.and retrieval media, and I'm Internet-addicted, but for me the paradigmatic reading experience involves print on paper.

However, Dr. Vertegaal's smartphone prototype, called PaperPhone, can be aptly described as a flexible iPhone. It does everything a smartphone does, such as store books, play music or even make phone calls. But instead of a rigid glass or plastic its display consists of a 9.5 cm diagonal thin-film flexible E-Ink display. The flexible form of the display makes it much more portable that any current mobile computer: it will shape with your pocket. It's also much more durable than any current mobile phone, a point illustrated convincingly in a demonstration video in which a PaperPhone screen is shown being beaten on vigorously with a mallet without as much as an image flicker. It still feels like plastic of course, but in this context flexible plastic beats the whiz out of rigid plastic in terms of comfortable feel. The potential for it supporting user input via a standard pen as cited by Dr. Vertegaal would just be icing on the proverbial cake.

Stylin'!

Being able to store and interact with documents on larger versions of these light, flexible computers would also be a major step toward realization of the long-predicted but thus far elusive paperless office by lessening the need for paper and printers even further.

"The paperless office is here. Everything can be stored digitally and you can place these computers on top of each other just like a stack of paper, or throw them around the desk" enthuses Dr. Vertegaal, who notes that besides revolutionizing the world of mobile smartphones, this invention heralds a new generation of computers that are super lightweight, thin-film in form factor, comfortably flexible, and that use no power when nobody is interacting with them, and when you are, it doesn't feel like you're holding a slab of glass or metal.

The only downside is that you'll likely have to wait at least five hears for this next wave of potentially disruptive technology to reach consumer hands. At least by that time the iPhone 5 should have arrived!

Dr. Vertegaal will unveil his paper computer to his scientific peers on May 10 at 2 pm at the Association of Computing Machinery's CHI 2011 (Computer Human Interaction) conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, — the field's premier international event. An article on a study of interactive use of bending with flexible thinfilm computers is to be published at this conference, where the development group is also demonstrating a thinfilm wristband computer called "Snaplet."

Just like the iPhone, PaperPhone has a dynamic touch screen

The PaperPhone development team also includes researchers Byron Lahey and Win Burleson of the Motivational Environments Research Group at Arizona State University (ASU), Audrey Girouard and Aneesh Tarun from the Human Media Lab at Queen's University, Jann Kaminski and Nick Colaneri, director of ASU's Flexible Display Center, and Seth Bishop and Michael McCreary, the VP R&D of E Ink Corporation.