Fujitsu’s Tsutae Shinoda is recognised as the father of the Plasma. At CEATEC, he showed off a demo of his latest invention: a 1mm thin Plasma display layer that also happens to be flexible. The 100x 50 CM display was about 43-inches in diagonal. Impressive for a proto, you’re thinking, ya? No. The pixel pitch is huge at 3mm.
Best thing about it is that you can stitch these things together. (Another cool advantage is that these flexithin plasmas don’t need to be manufactured in a clean room, so prices should be low.) It’ll be 5 to 10 years before this hits market, they say. I say most predictions that are 5 to 10 years out might as well be 50 years out. But since these displays can be stitched together, off the top of my head, I think the best application might be plasma wallpaper. [Techon]
At first glance, there’s nothing special about this mobile just demonstrated at CEATEC Japan 2007, but upon closer inspection you’ll notice that the keyboard uses electronic ink (e-ink), capable of changing the display on each alphanumeric key whenever the spirit moves you. Just hit a Shift key and you can see an entirely different set of characters, similar to that possibly-forthcoming Optimus Maximus keyboard by Art.Lebedev. That concept will have major advantages for a mobile.
Besides the tactile feedback you’ll get from individual keys, the major advantage is the way e-ink barely sips battery power, only requiring juice when it changes the display, because it doesn’t use constantly shining backlights or LEDs at all. So even if battery technology stays the same in the next few years, mobiles can last a lot longer with this tech on board. But hey, we want to see flexible e-ink displays. [Xumdeo, via Uber Gizmo]
This is actually a 32-sided speaker from CEATEC, although I think it would work very well as either a steampunk microphone, a glitter ball for the Tin Man, or a lollipop for Ro-lita, a sexy underage she-bot. [Gizmodo Japan]
The Wellness phone is about as mean as you can get. A concept that DoCoMo has been only too happy to show off at CEATEC this week, the mobile measures how bad your breath is on a scale of 1 to 10 — zero presumably means you’re dead — and how overweight you are. There are other health-related features as well, such as a calorie counter and pedometer. Is this the saddest phone concept ever made? Probably. [GearFuse via MobileMentalism]
