Prepeat inkless and tonerless rewritable printer

Inkless / tonerless printers aren't exactly new, but here's a more novel approach: inkless, tonerless, and completely reusable. The PrePeat rewritable printer is exactly that: using special paper made of PET plastic, you can make all the flowcharts and meeting notes you need, and when you want to start fresh, feed the paper back in to start fresh. Upfront cost is 500,000 yen (about $5,600 in US) for the printer and 300 yen for each sheet, in lots of 1,000 -- which we're taking to mean at least another 300,000 yen / $3,360 to get some use out of it. Each piece of paper is said to work about 1,000 times, but no word on how much (if any) history can be extracted from the materials -- just keep that in mind should sensitive information be your daily trade. Video demonstration after the break.

Samsung's first Bada phone with Super AMOLED to be announced on February 14th?

By now you're undoubtedly aware than Samsung has a new smartphone OS (Bada) and touchscreen technology (Super AMOLED) in the works. In this case, putting 2 and 2 together yields 14, a number that matches Samsung's February 14th press event at Mobile World Congress. How so? Well, first of all, Sammy is promoting the Samsung Unpacked teaser page from its Bada site. The ocean-themed teaser ("bada" means "ocean" in Korean) says, "on 2.14 a new mobile from Samsung is born. See it first in Barcelona." A quick look at the teaser site's source reveals the keywords "Bada," "smartphone," and "AMOLED." In other words, you can bet that Samsung will be unveiling a 3.3-inch, 800 x 480 pixel Super AMOLED (already rumored for a next week reveal) touchscreen Bada phone on February 14th.

P.S. The image above comes courtesy of GSM Arena. While the site won't say what the device is on the left it's clearly running Samsung's Bada UI and is likely AMOLED judging by those deep blacks. The display is also slightly smaller than the iPhone 3G's 3.5-inch display. Gee... what could it be?

http://www.samsungunpacked.com/

ASUS shows flexible-OLED concept devices

ASUS is showing off its new Waveface family of concept devices. Two of these use flexible OLEDs. The Ultra is a wearable (on the wrist) mobile phone that is controlled with hand gestures or by touching the display.

ASUS Waveface Ultra

The Waveface Light has physical keyboard that pops up when folded up into the laptop form factor.

ASUS Waveface Light

Samsung's Transparent OLED Laptop Coming Soon

Plastic Electronics reports that Samsung Electronics will release products using its clear active matrix OLED displays within the next 12 months. Samsung displayed prototypes using the clear AMOLEDs during CES 2010 back in January. However this is the first indication that the models on display will actually head to retail any time soon.

The laptop sporting Samsung's clear AMOLED allowed the user to see objects placed behind the screen while still offering sharp, bright images on the display. While the actual technology was quite impressive, the ability to see movement through the AMOLED screen looked to be somewhat distracting.

Plastic Electronics said that the first device to go commercial using the tech will be Samsung's IceTouch MP3 player (YP-H1). This device is a portable all-in-one that plays music, DVDs, tunes in FM radio stations, and more. The estimated price will be around $328 USD when it finally hits the market.

Reid Sullivan, VP of audio/video and digital imaging marketing at Samsung Electronics America, said that the AMOLED display should raise the bar for the next generation of portable devices. While that's all fine and dandy, where's that cool 14-inch laptop we saw at CES 2010? Apparently that should be on the market within the next twelve months too.

"We have a lab in Korea that is currently working on developing a laptop with partially-transparent screen," Sullivan said. "Soon, I imagine that all Samsung's audio-visual products will feature this technology. We want to be the first in this market."