The Kindle, in future, might very well use a color flexible display – Its interesting to see the competing technologies and speculate on which could be used in a ‘Next Generation’ Kindle. It’ll probably be Kindle 4 or later since most of these displays only have prototypes available and it won’t be 2-3 years until they’re released. It’ll probably take another year after that for the price of these displays to become reasonable.
Edit: eInk already has flexible non-color display screens - for example in the Readius cellphone.
Here are some of the Flexible Displays currently being developed -
- Fledge Interactive’s FlexDisplay. This is my favorite as the images look really good.
- Tsutae Shinoda is the inventor of the plasma display, and his company, Shinoda Plasma Corp., have developed a 1 mm thick, and 125 inches wide display that will be available in mid of 2009.
- Sony’s Flexible OLED display. The organic Light Emitting Diodes emit their own light.
- Samsung’s Flexible OLED display.
- The HP-ASU Display. U.S. Army-backed research is going on at Arizona State University’s Flexible Display Center. The displays might be trialled by soldiers in 2010 or 2011. The project has been going on since 2004, and the U.S. Army has invested nearly $44 million toward the research.
- Rolled Displays from VTT Technical Research Centre in Finland. They’re 2 years away from market trials so products based on their technology are still very far away.
There are a lot of very interesting developments going on in display technology. This bodes well for cellphones, the kindle and other portable technology. The large number of small and large companies developing next generation display technology (and the huge amount of funding startups in this area are getting) is a reflection of the huge opportunities. I was looking at a jacket last week and marvelling at the fact that you could plug in your ipod and there were buttons on the jacket’s sleeve itself that linked to your ipod. To think that in 3-5 years we might have wearable displays – Wow!
Filed under: kindle 3 Tagged: | fleixble displays, kindle display
[...] and Xerox have filed patents citing eInk and SiPix’s patents. HP is explained as the HP-ASU joint project on flexible displays (5th item on the list), and the Phillips Electronics patent is probably eInk andPVI. The Xerox [...]