LG begins mass production of first flexible e-ink displays
extremetech.com
extremetech.com
When they can inexpensively support enough reactivity to support touch interfaces, it goes much beyond just reading.
It still needs to refresh the entire screen to get gradients though.
I'm also liking the higher dpi on LG's screen, after using my new ipad the sony t1 seems pixelated.
So either they will be releasing their own device, or they already have someone wanting to use their screens. Either way, the answer to your question is "yes".
I don't want paper-like e-ink displays that start to feel all "used" after a couple of days. Bending them will presumably keep them from lying flat later on. People talk about wanting to "fold" them -- and then you'll never get the creases out. And I don't want a whole book of these sheets -- for me, the whole advantage is that an e-reader doesn't need page turning!
If I had a flexible display, I would just keep it protected in a hard-backed case, thus negating the whole point. Am I missing something here?
2. It's easier to fit into your bag/pocket. You don't have to fold it for that, simply bending it a just bit would help in many scenarios. Plus again, it doesn't break so you can use your back pocket for your smart phone and sit on it.
It's also possible that electrically activated memory-metals could be used to "snap" such a device into a stiff rectangle when in use, but we have a way to go on those technologies yet.
What I’m really looking forward to are outright foldable (yet uncreasable) display surfaces. Done reading the e-paper? Fold it up and stuff it in your bag, worry-free.
Posts two and three in this thread: http://www.howardforums.com/showthread.php/221720-Your-Dream...)
show it partly and fully opened
In many ways, foldability is just the medieval substitute for a dynamic display. Instead of switching screens, you flip pages. Instead of zooming maps, you unfold the whole thing, then fold over everything except the part you're interested in.
Take your maps example as a generic zooming vs. folding example. When you use something like Google Maps, if you set your browser window to show you 2cm x 2cm, would that be big enough, I doubt it. And yet your screen doesn't have to be as big as an unfolded traditional map, thanks to panning and zooming. This shows that a.) dynamic displays can reduce the need for folding but that b.) there will always be a (subjective) question of what works best.
As to a more realistic example - as a kindle reader, I wouldn't want a screen smaller than it already has, no matter how much zooming or scrolling it offers. And while the device can fit in a pocket, I generally don't like having it in one. If it was half the width and I could fold it in half, I would love that.
Scrolling and zooming are not appropriate substitutes for folding in electronic displays. A real substitute would be a pocket-size device that can project an image of arbitrary size in mid-air, so that people can see their maps IMAX at a distance of 3 feet if they want to.
Edit: some rewording.
I guess some people downvoted me because they took "Medieval" to be pejorative. I was being entirely literal. Linen-based paper was widespread in medieval Europe after the plagues. (Much of it was made of the linen clothing of people who no longer needed it, on account of their being suddenly dead.) Such paper is much more amenable to folding in the manner of a map than earlier technologies. (Though most everything seems to roll up into scrolls well enough.)
Scrolling and zooming are not appropriate substitutes for folding in electronic displays.
That's entirely contextual, as you also point out. You won't know how well things can take folding and how well the form factor performs in real life until you have such materials. Until then, we know zooming works. If I had something as light as and the same size as a clipboard that was daylight readable and yet as dynamic as an iPad, this would enable a whole other world of mobile applications that aren't quite there yet. I'm hard pressed to imagine an application I'd need that could fold out, which couldn't also be met by presentation/projection systems, or perhaps an interactive worktable form factor.
I'm not really sure if it would be useful but it would be a cool magical book.
Differing page counts and all that aside, a UI feature I like is being able to locate content based on relative location, which is especially handy when I can recall the general concept but not specific search terms.
There's a museum in Oslo (can't remember which one) that has a book like this. The book is really big, like an old school story book, and it's fixed into the table, there's maybe 10 pages. They have a projector in the ceiling above the book projecting images so they fit exactly onto the pages in the book. Each page has an invisible rfid-chip embedded in the paper so when you turn the book some sensor knows which page you have open and the projector changes page accordingly. (it also displays video and has touch-interface but that's irrelevant for this discussion). It feels magic to flip through it even though the implementation is quite trivial once you decompose it. Too bad it can't be done without having it in a fixed location.
When you are a group of people it is much easier to flip through and keeping a mental map over physical pages instead of fighting over who gets to control the scrollbar on a computer. But admittedly, it is also a bit gimmicky.
Sure there are demos where they hit on of these film/screens with a shoe and nothing happens, but when I saw Samsung's flexible tablet video you could clearly see how the section that folded was already damaged, like an old book cover that's about to crack.
Whoever solves this is golden, high-scale manufacturing AFAIK has already been solved by HPLabs.
Finally the display can be put to use, even when it's not in use.
Now the question is when we get flexible, touch Mirasol... which will presumably be after we get Mirasol.