Flexible paper tablet unveiled

London: A revolutionary paper-thin flexible tablet computer was on Tuesday unveiled by a British technology firm in collaboration with Intel and a Canadian University.
The flexible tablet PC has been created by Plastic Logic, a cutting edge plastic electronics firm founded by researchers from the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University in the UK. The firm is headed by Oxford and Wharton graduate Indro Mukherjee.
The tablet called PaperTab, with a flexible, high-resolution 10.7” plastic display, looks and feels just like a sheet of paper. It was developed by researchers at Queen’s University in Canada along with Plastic Logic and has an Intel Core i5 processor.  The revolutionary device was unveiled at International Consumer Electronics Show (CES 2013) in Las Vegas on Tuesday.
The tablet instead of using several apps or windows on a single display, gives users ten or more interactive displays or “PaperTabs,” which are used to display one app each.
“Using several PaperTabs makes it much easier to work with multiple documents,” according to Roel Vertegaal, director of Queen’s University’s Human Media Lab. “Within five to ten years, most computers, from ultra-notebooks to tablets, will look and feel just like these sheets of printed colour paper.”
The development of this revolutionary tablet will cut out the need for printouts to keep a reord of the data on computers.
“PaperTab can file and display thousands of paper documents, replacing the need for a computer monitor and stacks of papers or printouts. Unlike traditional tablets, PaperTabs keep track of their location relative to each other, and the user, providing a seamless experience across all apps, as if they were physical computer windows,” Plastic Logic said.
“Plastic Logic’s flexible plastic displays are completely transformational in terms of product interaction. They allow a natural human interaction with electronic paper, being lighter, thinner and more robust compared with today’s standard glass-based displays. This is just one example of the innovative revolutionary design approaches enabled by flexible displays,” Indro Mukerjee, CEO of Plastic Logic, said.
The tablet also makes the difference between paper and computers almost negligible, as it can be easily tossed around on a desk and provide a magazine-like reading experience. “By bending one side of the display, users can also navigate through pages like a magazine, without needing to press a button,” the British-based firm said.
The tablet will also do away with the screen size issue as a larger drawing or display surface can created simply by placing two or more PaperTabs side by side. “PaperTab thus emulates the natural handling of multiple sheets of paper by combining thin-film display, thin-film input and computing technologies through intuitive interaction design.”