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.
The Waveface Light has physical keyboard that pops up when folded up into the laptop form factor.
ASUS Waveface Light
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."
We've heard of a few inventive ideas for detecting tsunamis, and it looks like a group of researchers from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (or NOAA) have now come up with another: put all those undersea internet cables to a second use. While they haven't moved beyond computer models just yet, the group has apparently found that voltmeters attached to the end of an undersea cable are able to detect the small electric field stirred up by tsunamis, which measure around 500 millivolts. As New Scientist reports, however, the idea does have some considerable limitations, including that it wouldn't be able to pinpoint the exact location or direction of a tsunami, and that any such system would first need to filter out noise caused by other natural events and even the cable itself. Other researchers also caution that it's just as important to develop a system to quickly pass on a warning to potentially affected areas once a tsunami has been detected.
