HP Says Palm Devices Could Get Flexible Displays

By Geoff Duncan July 13, 2010

Image used with permission by copyright holder

Technology conferences have a way of highlighting technology and ideas which never make it into the hands of consumers, but in the wake of Hewlett-Packard’s $1.2 billion acquisition of Palm industry watchers have been waiting to see what one of the world’s largest technology companies plans to do with a top-flight Internet-based mobile operating system like webOS…and many are hoping for more printers with pretty screens. A glimpse may have come at this year’s MobileBeat conference in San Francisco, where Hewlett-Packard CTOP and VP Phil McKinney discussed HP’s flexible display technology…and hinted it might turn up in future webOS devices.

HP has been working on mylar-supported sheets using construction processes similar to those used to produce some types of solar cells, enabling the sheets to flex and twist while still displaying an image. Moreover, like EInk displays, the technology can show an image when when completely powered down, meaning it would be possible to create a reader display that can bend and twist, yet still show fixed text or images while consuming no battery power. The flexible display technology does look to be quite a distance in the future; for the time being, HP expects to follow Palm’s existing device and design roadmap for forthcoming devices.

McKinney also indicated he’s personally excited to see Palm’s webOS on slate-style devices—if not the Windows 7 slate Microsoft CEO Steve Baller famously demoed at CES back in January—but indicated that the company wasn’t making any product announcements.

[Image credit: VentureBeat]

Topics

Former Digital Trends Contributor

Geoff Duncan writes, programs, edits, plays music, and delights in making software misbehave. He's probably the only member…

Computing

This AI cloned my voice using just three minutes of audio

acapela group voice cloning ad

There's a scene in Mission Impossible 3 that you might recall. In it, our hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) tackles the movie's villain, holds him at gunpoint, and forces him to read a bizarre series of sentences aloud.

"The pleasure of Busby's company is what I most enjoy," he reluctantly reads. "He put a tack on Miss Yancy's chair, and she called him a horrible boy. At the end of the month, he was flinging two kittens across the width of the room ..."

News

Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards

Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

News

Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards

Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.