Readius mobile with fold-away display pops up

Polymer Vision announced the Readius mobile phone with a display as large as two business cards. In other words the Dutch company R&D department has managed to squeeze a screen with twice the surface area of Apple iPhone in a device not much larger than most mobiles around.

The 3G HSDPA-enabled tri-band Readius mobile has a sparkling 5" display that can be folded so the phone takes the dimensions of 115 x 57 x 21mm. However the display is only capable of showing 16 grayscales rather than being a color one. It does partially compensate for that with the fact that thanks to the technology used it has amazing power saving capabilities. In fact once a picture is displayed no further energy is needed until the image changes.

Polymer Vision Readius

The battery life on the unique Readius mobile phone is quoted at up to 30 hours of reading. By the sound of it, Polymer Vision will be challenging the Amazon's Kindle e-book reader, since the grayscale display will not do any good in watching videos or browsing photos.

Connectivity is well taken care of with the Readius with USB v2.0 and Bluetooth v2.0 present. There is also a microSD card slot built-in the device that even supports high capacity memory cards.

Polymer Vision Readius held in hand

The Readius mobile is powered by a 400MHz ARM processor and has only 8 hardware keys that are used for all its features.

It's already in retail production and is expected to set foot on stores worldwide in mid-2008. Price is not yet known, but it's supposed to be somewhere in the lines of high-end mobile phones.