Canadian Researchers Debut PaperTab, the Paper-Thin Tablet 142
redletterdave writes "The PaperTab, which looks and feels just like a sheet of paper, may one day overtake today's tablet. Developed by researchers at the Human Media Lab at Queen's University in Ontario, Canada, the PaperTab features a flexible, high-resolution 10.7-inch plastic touchscreen display built by Plastic Logic, the company borne from Cambridge University's Cavendish Laboratory, and relies on a second-generation Intel Core i5 processor to turn what looks like a sheet of white paper into a living, interactive display. Unlike typical tablets akin to Apple's iPad, the idea of PaperTab is to use one app at a time, per PaperTab. To make tasks easier, users would own 10 or more PaperTabs at once and lay them out to their liking; with multiple tablets to separate your applications, PaperTab relies on an interface that allows you to combine and merge elements from disparate applications with intuitive dragging, dropping, pointing, and folding."
Grammar? (Score:1, Insightful)
Good to see our editors proof read: "may one today overtake today's tablet."
Display, not tablet (Score:5, Insightful)
When you get all the components you need for a tablet you end up with something just as thick as what we've got on shelves today. By no means thick, but not paper-thin.
Re:Display, not tablet (Score:4, Insightful)
What about a paper thin battery. (Thats going to last more than a few minutes)
Re:Epaper and OLED has always been flexible (Score:4, Insightful)
"since the day they were born in the lab, but there is more to a computer than its display, wheres the flexible and paper thin battery, the flexible core i5, the flexible ram rom and flash?"
They are in the basement computer, doing all the work and sending the result to the screen, like ...how would you call it... a thin client. :-)
Re:Chips are WAY thinner then paper (Score:5, Insightful)
The thickness of the wafers onto which chips are etched is NOT 7 microns. The standard wafer thickness is about 775um, or just about 1mm. That doesn't count the substrate onto which the electrical connections must be soldered.
It's also extremely fragile at this thickness, and a big portion of placing it onto a ceramic or organic plastic substrate is so that it doesn't crack.
With a plain wafer, you can crack it by gently rapping it with your knuckle, or dropping it gently on a hard surface.
Thickness may not be the issue, but durability is. So is heat dissipation. A modern chip is designed to dissipate heat rapidly, among other things. There are all sort of problems beyond flexibility that plague this particular engineering problem.
Do not want... (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure, it's cool that it's paper thin... but a) it's black and white, not color; and b) the refresh rate, if the video is any indication, seems abysmal for anything but static displays.
Can somebody please tell me what possible advantage this has over an e-ink reader?
Re:Epaper and OLED has always been flexible (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh, cool! So the thin client doesn't even need a battery?
Re:Apple invented paper. (Score:3, Insightful)
http://memegenerator.net/instance/24860964 [memegenerator.net]
[Get called fat lazy and stupid by other countries; beat them at the olympics and land on Mars]
Re:Hopefully they go wireless... (Score:5, Insightful)
Basically each 'tablet' is just a display, with all other hardware removed. The wires are connected to an actual CPU, which does all the processing, etc.
In other words, these guys bought a display and wired it up. Woohoo.
Re:Do not want... (Score:4, Insightful)
What POSSIBLE advantage might the eventual production outcomes of this R&D prototype have? If you can't see that you are suffering from a severe lack of imagination.