Glimpsing the mobile future

BBCNews tech-reporter Bill Thompson discusses the latest in various mobile technologies in Glimpsing the mobile future:

Touch sensitive displays are increasingly common, and multi-touch systems that let you make gestures and direct activities using several fingers at once will allow novel user interfaces for all sorts of devices. LG Philips and Universal Display Corporation have their own full-colour flexible screen, with a 320 by 240 pixel display, while Cambridge Display Technology continues to develop its own flexible screens based around polymer LEDs.

We're also seeing devices with new displays built in to them, like the Sony Reader, or the new Readius from Polymer Vision which has a screen that wraps around and unfolds to let you read from its greyscale display. Researchers in the US have managed to solve one of the problems facing these displays, which is that while the displays themselves can be made transparent the electronics which control them are opaque.

We now have see-through transistors made with zinc oxide and indium oxide 'nanowires', making it possible to build displays into glasses or car windscreens.

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