What’s Two-faced And Transparent? Your Future Smartphone. You would think that we reached a sort of technological milestone with the “smart”-phone and the techies would pat themselves on the back and just rest for a while. Half of all phones shipped in the world are going to be smartphones this year. But no, the techies don’t want to stop – they never have, they never will. Now they are all about making these phones smarter and smarter, like some overly demanding parents. In the near future, two smarter devices are going to hit the market – one that has a completely transparent body and one that comes with two screens.
A Taiwanese phone manufacturer recently released the prototype for what appears to be the world’s first transparent phone. Polytron Technologies has created this product with its unique Polyvision Privacy Glass. The glass is built with special technology that causes it to look transparent when it is powered up. An ordinary glass opaque phone when it is powered off, its liquid crystal molecules create a line that allows light to pass through when it is supplied with electricity, therefore giving it the transparence.
The only parts that aren’t see-through are the batteries, the SIM card and the on-off switch at the top. As far as the prototype is concerned, there was only hardware, no operating system. But Polytron claims that it is talking to several handset makers and hopes to have a limited quantity of production by the end of the year.
In other news, you could soon use an Android that comes with two screens – one regular and one in e-ink. Yota Device is developing a phone known as YotaPhone, which will come with a full-color LCD display in the front and an electronic paper display in the back. The LCD display is that of any regular smartphone and can be used for all regular purposes, while the back display is meant to showcase or store aside some things that you want to push off of your regular display. This could include a calendar, clock, stopwatch or even your boarding pass.
YotaPhone will come with Android 4.1 Jelly Bean running on Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM 9690 platform, and be equipped with Corning’s 3D Gorilla Glass. The company hopes to release it in the market later this year and is currently distributing the API so that developers can make apps that take advantage of the dual display.
