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Flexible e-reader, the Readius, is dead

Polymer Vision's dream of an all-in-one e-book reader and portable media device has reportedly faded.

The Netherlands-based maker of the Readius folded recently, according to a report in England's Hampshire Chronicle. The company was a spinoff of Philips and had offices in Southampton in the U.K. The local paper says 50 jobs at the Southampton location were lost when the company went bankrupt on July 7.

The Readius was a strange-looking, if ambitious device. Part portable media device, part e-reader, the Readius was innovative in that it used a flexible E-Ink display so it could be folded … Read more

GSMA Day 3 wrap-up

The GSMA Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, is winding to a close, but that doesn't mean mobile phone news have stopped streaming in. The third day of GSMA 2008 saw AMD announcing big plans for mobile phone processors, RIM's co-CEO downplaying the recent BlackBerry outage, and the LiMo Foundation possibly giving Google's Android a run for its money with its own effort at an open, Linux-based operating system. Of course, we also took the opportunity to look at phones and carriers off the beaten path.

For starters, Senior Editor Kent German explored the large Vodafone plaza (… Read more

Hands-on with the Readius

Polymer Vision is a company spun off from Philips. Its claim to fame is the Readius, an e-book reader which is also a mobile phone. Though it has been around for more than a year, there's renewed interest in it because it will finally be shipping in 2008. We tracked down the company's booth at the GSMA Mobile World Congress to learn more about this device.

The primary purpose of the Readius is to act as an e-book reader. Even though the display resolution is pedestrian at 320x240 pixels, the fact that it can be rolled up allows … Read more

Phone with rollout display to roll out

If we were editors for a thesaurus, "brag" would become a synonym for "concept." Companies tease consumers all the time with digital renderings of products that never see the light of day. This is why it came as quite a surprise that Polymer Vision, a spinoff from Dutch company Philips, has committed to selling its Readius mobile phone with a rollout display.

This mobile phone is not much bigger than your average candy-bar handset but still manages to include a 5-inch display that can be folded out to one side. The screen is a monochrome one (… Read more