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ReFlex: The World's First Practical Bendable Phone
Wednesday 17th February 2016 | Arash
A Smartphone prototype that would revolutionise physical interaction has been developed by academics at Queen’s University, Canada.
The prototype named, “ReFlex” allows users to turn the page of a book or play games like Angry Birds just by bending the top and bottom ends of the phone.
This is one of the first real implications of bendable screens in smartphone development and has been developed with a 720p LG Flexible OLED touch screen, Android’s KitKat operating system and a haptic actuator in order to detect the bending of the phone and give feedback in relation to the angle and current application process.
This is a huge development in the tech world, allowing the phone to bend accordingly, not because it looks cool, but because it’s actually practical.
In addition to playing games and reading, the developers believe that there are greater uses for the technology. Still in development though, they claim that it won’t be ready for commercial use for a “couple of years,” so anyone hoping for a new bendy smartphone will be disappointed, for now anyway.
Other companies have also tried to make bendable and foldable phones in the past. The technology is only just starting to really develop; LG’s G Flex 2 is just one of a number of curved smartphones that have been released by the company.
Samsung has also released many concepts for foldable phones and what they call flexible “Morphees” which are another idea for foldable phones, but inflexible batteries restrict phone designs to the rigid hard cases that we’re used to.
