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Eindhoven: A Dutch company has squeezed a display the size of two business cards into a gadget no bigger than other mobile phones - by making a screen that folds up when not in use.
The five-inch (13-cm) display of Polymer Vision's "Readius" is the world's first that folds out when the user wants to read news, blogs or e-mail and folds back together so that the device can fit into a pocket.
Polymer Vision, spun out of Philips, whetted the appetite of gadget fans more than two years ago when it showed off a prototype. Now the gadget is in production and will go head-to-head with Apple's iPhone and Amazon's ebook reader Kindle when it hits stores mid-2008.
Features
"You get the large display of e-reading, the super battery life of e-reading, and the high-end connectivity ... and the form factor and weight of a mobile phone," said Karl McGoldrick, chief executive of the venture capital-funded firm, in which Philips still has a 25 per cent stake.
"We are taking e-reading and bringing it to the mobile phone."
He would not say how much the Readius would cost, but said it would be comparable to a high-end mobile phone.
McGoldrick said his "dream device", which the company planned to build within five years, was a mobile phone with an eight-inch colour display that could show video.
Like Amazon's Kindle, the Readius has a so-called electronic paper screen, which displays black-and-white text and images that look almost like they have been printed on paper.
The device connects to the internet using the third-generation mobile phone networks.
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