Matt Brennesholtz
Insight Media Analyst

Polymer Vision, a 2006 spin out of Royal Philips Electronics, announced on Monday they would introduce the world’s first commercial flexible display at the 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona on February 12th. Polymer Vision is partnered with Telecom Italia and its mobile telephone arm, TIM (Telecom Italia Mobile), and will initially introduce this system in Italy. Karl McGoldrick, CEO of Polymer Vision and architect of the spin-out from Philips, gave a presentation yesterday at the well-attended USDC Flexible Displays & Microelectronics conference in Phoenix. When asked, he would not comment on the price of the system or the product availability date, although the intention is to launch in 2007. He said $27 Million in financing has been arranged and installation of the production equipment has begun. The Polymer Vision system and a similar announcement from Plastic Logic with $100M in financing for a Fab created significant buzz at the conference since the announcements signal the initiation of the flexible display business into large scale manufacturing.

This system is titled "Cellular-Book" and users will be able to download content from the TIM network. The initial product will have a black-and-white 5 reflective display with 16 levels of gray scale. Initial models will have 4G of memory. Since the display only consumes power when updating changes to the image and there is no front or back-light, power consumption is extremely low. Polymer Vision says the new device will deliver about 10 days of average usage time between battery charges.

When used with TIM’s mobile services, the device will permit instant access to personalized data, e-mail, news, information feeds and location-sensitive maps wherever and whenever, in Italy at least. This always-on user experience is enabled by a combination of cellular (EDGE/UMTS) and broadcast (DVB-H IP data-casting) mobile functionalities. The system also has a mini-USB slot for PC connection and a wired/wireless broadband data connection.

The product follows up on the rollable display technology based concept device "Readius" presented by Polymer Vision less than 18 months ago at the IFA Consumer Electronics Trade Fair in Berlin. This in turn builds on a 5" rollable display shown by Philips at SID in 2005 in Boston.

When rolled, the Cellular-Book is about the size of a typical cell phone and works with TIM’s mobile network via a regular SIM Card in the device. There is also a touch-screen keypad. My guess is we can expect Polymer Vision and Telecom Italia to add a speaker and microphone to future versions, producing a full featured mobile telephone system. This assumption was shared by most of the 340 attendees at the Flexible Displays conference. Stand-alone e-books have enjoyed only limited popularity compared to smart phones such as the Blackberry or other entertainment devices such as the iPod. Combining full e-book functionality with a smart phone sounds like a smart idea to me.

An expanded version of this story, plus a complete report on the USDC’s Flexible Displays and Microelectronics Conference will be in the forthcoming issue of Mobile Display Report from Insight Media.