One of the most noticeable flaws of the ubiquitous touch screen is the ease of blocking the screen with the very fingers that operate the devices. This concept from researchers at the National University of Taiwan in Taipei might be the solution to that frustrating problem. The fingertip-mounted OLED displays are tiny enough to fit over your finger, but smart enough to see what is under your fingers on the screen. This eliminates shooting the wrong alien, harvesting the wrong crop, or whatever other tiny-scale “work” you have to do on your touch screen device.

Of course, for a device as futuristic as the NailDisplay, you would expect it to do a lot more than simply show you where your next Tetris piece is going. The research team has a ton of other utilization ideas, from fingertip translators to screen-free music players to thumb-and-pinkie phones.

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It’s been a long time coming, and now it looks like the age of the flexible OLED screen smartphone is just about here. In 2011 two different manufacturers came out with concepts for flexible, bendable phones that are unlike anything we’ve seen until now. Both of the concepts are totally amazing, but neither is quite ready for store shelves just yet.

Samsung’s Galaxy Skin is sleek, bendy, ultra-thin and virtually indestructible. The AMOLED screen can be manipulated into tons of different configurations for talking, time-keeping, listening to music, watching movies and probably a hundred other things.

The Galaxy Skin concept is the product of designer Keyon You. Although Samsung showed off a very cool physical mockup of the phone at CES 2011 there’s no release date for it yet.

The other flexible phone design getting a lot of attention right now is Nokia’s HumanForm. It does not – despite its name – have the form of a human. It’s actually a teardrop-shaped thing with a touch screen the size of the entire phone. The phone design itself is just so-so, but the kinetic interface shown in the video below is completely bananas.

Twisting, folding, shaking, and otherwise manipulating the phone itself – rather than just some abstract buttons on a screen – sounds like a pretty good way to get out the frustrations of the day. Will we ever get to play with a phone like this in everyday life? Probably not in the next few years, but the time of the AMOLED phones is coming – and it’s going to be a bendy ride.

The post The Twisty Future of Calling: 2 Stunning Flexible Phones first appeared on Gajitz.

Phones are being used for so much more than just making calls these days: from texting to playing games to watching movies and listening to music. But for the most part, the mobile phone retains its traditional shape and functionality. Is it time to shake up the world of mobile phone design with a phone so radically different that it’s hardly recognizable as a phone? According to Brazilian designer Dinard da Mata, the next generation of mobile phone should be easily able to flow from one function to the next while remaining utterly gorgeous in the process.

Da Mata calls the design “Fluid” and gave it a (conceptual) Philips branding. The phone’s multi-tasking functionality isn’t all that’s fluid about it: its shape also allows it to morph from bracelet to phone to gaming system easily – and then back again over and over. Wearing the gadget on a wrist allows the user to stop worrying about whether his or her phone made it back into the purse or pocket where it belongs: the weight of the gadget on the wrist is enough to reassure its owner that it hasn’t been misplaced.

The secret to the Philips Fluid’s flexibility – both literal and figurative – lies in its flexible OLED display that spans nearly the entirety of the phone’s length. The display changes based on what you want it to do at the moment. When you want to make a call, a numeric keypad appears. When you want to play a game, gaming controls manifest. And when you need to search for the perfect application, your “home” screen displays all of your icons neatly.

The technology to make this particular phone isn’t available at the moment – at least not at a price that would make it reasonable as a consumer product. But it stands to reason that one day in the very near future, we will no longer have to worry about carrying multiple gadgets or even finding a pocket for our phones because everything we need will be in one compact gadget that fits neatly around the wrist.

The post Ultra-Flexible Smartphone Idea with Multiple Personalities first appeared on Gajitz.

Flexible OLEDs and all of the gadgets they’ll make possible – like electronic newspapers, roll-up laptops, and wearable computers – are the wave of the future. But they won’t be relegated to sci-fi stories for very long; Sony has just announced that their newest OLED display is thinner than a human hair and flexible enough to be wrapped around a pencil and stretched while still playing video.

The flexible display measures just 4.1 inches and boasts a 432 X 240 resolution. It’s the first display of its kind that can be manipulated while streaming video and not lose any of the picture quality. It’s OTFT (organic thin-film transistor)-driven, which gives it a high degree of flexibility while keeping the thickness and weight extremely low. The process used to make the display is more environmentally-friendly than the process used to manufacture conventional LEDs.

It’s still early days for the new flexible display, but one of its most-anticipated applications is wearable displays. But we can also look forward to huge leaps in e-paper gadgets and mobile phones with enhanced displays and thinner profiles. Sony plans to put some effort into improving the performance of the thin, rollable OLEDs, so we can look forward to seeing them pop up soon in all kinds of products.

The post Moving Pictures: First Rollable Super-Thin OLED Display first appeared on Gajitz.

Taking the newspaper along with you used to be considered a pretty convenient way to keep up with current events when you’re on the go. But with smartphones, laptops and a whole world of portable devices to put the news at your fingertips no matter where you are, newspapers seem fiddly and overly complicated. Various companies have been developing e-paper technology for years now, but LG actually unveiled theirs in January of 2010. The flexible 19-inch display is mounted on a flexible foil substrate rather than glass, so it’s just as portable as tablet computers but bendy enough to be rolled up.

Could this mean the death of the newspaper? On the contrary, this seems like a great way for newspapers to keep up with the digital age; they could charge for subscriptions just as they do with the hard-copy newspaper, but distributing in a digital format would save countless amounts of money for them. It would also cut down on paper consumption, wastewater and carbon emissions.

But will people ever really be comfortable carrying around a newspaper substitute? It worked in Minority Report. In fact, if the e-paper newspapers of the future featured dynamic headlines that updated via wi-fi with every passing minute, the troubled newspaper industry may just be able to work their way back into the daily lives of millions of people.

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