“Specialty glass Company Corning, famous for its ‘gorilla glass’ used in Apple devices, has an ultra-slim flexible glass called ‘willow glass’ that has the potential to enable displays to be wrapped around a device,” Jack Purcher reports for Patently Apple.
“Corning said it’s currently shipping samples of willow glass, which is compatible with OLED displays, to companies,” Purcher reports. “Companies like Samsung and Microsoft already have patents on this type of concept and Nokia has a concept video that’s very interesting. The race to overtake Apple’s iPad is hot, as competitors team up with cutting edge University research labs to find that next great thing that could topple the iPad.”
Purcher reports, “Yet Tony Fadell, Apple’s former Senior Vice President of the iPod Division, thinks that Apple has more technology coming to the iPad that will keep the iPad on top.”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Judge Bork” for the heads up.]
This is almost purely research thing, not much to do with real life mass market devices.
Besides screen, there is nothing could be done as flexible in a tablet. Even if flexible electronics would be dead slow, then flexible batteries would be a deal breaker. Those are very ineffective and unsafe.
Also, the level of flexibility that would be really useful — when you can make a cylindric device which has unrollable screen — it totally incompatible with any type of glass, including “willow glass”.
Such device in the future could be done with organic cover, which far more flexible, but it will not work for touch-based devices since anything less than hardened glass is scratch-prone.
Think touchstone, a device so cleverly designed it glows in white phosphorescence in the presence of processors cloaked in near-field technology. Perhaps we should call it a near-field-process.
A membrane so maleable you could wad it up, would provide I/O and transluscent video. The membrane would stick to any glass surface and come in custom widths.
Memory and storage are obsolete except in vertical zones of control which are now governed by NSA because of the shit storm that is the free-range internet, foreign to many who spend their time in walled gardens, like Facebook, iTunes, and Comcast, which are the last three remaining corporations left.
P.S. Facebook purchases Gaggle in 2025.
And then I woke up!
“The race to overtake Apple’s iPad is hot”
They will need to catch up with Apple before they can think about overtaking them.
they will need to be able to see apple’s dust in the distance to even think about catching up with them! Good luck with that!
“the race to catch up to Apple’s exhaust fumes is hot”
Fixed it
Unfortinately all they are able to do is inhale the fumes and get high.
At least it makes the ass kicking easier to deal with.
I’m thinking HUD for my motorcycle helmet visor. I can watch Season 3 Breaking Bad while racing out to the Mojave Desert to check on my lab.
Has Andy Inhatko sold out? His review is confusing and contradictory:
http://www.suntimes.com/technology/ihnatko/13801436-452/nexus-7-a-good-rival-for-the-ipad-in-a-compact-size.html
As others wrote above, tactile feedback and Willow Glass are likely things Apple is working on. But those two technologies—at least in there current forms—seem to be mutually incompatible.
Willow Glass in its current thickness is capable of a roughly 30 millimeter bend radius. Tactile feedback will need radii around 0.5–2 mm. Just try sticking a pencile eraser into Willow Glass and try to get a bump in the shee you can feelt.
Even such solutions like trying to get clever vibration modes to trick the finger into thinking it is landing on a button and clicking it would seem to be incompatible with glass unless it is far thinner than Corning’s current capabilities.