Flexible displays in webOS's (distant) future?
As we mentioned in our liveblog and wrap-up of Phil McKinney's keynote at MobileBeat 2010, HP's CTO was very clear that he wasn't announcing any new hardware - he likes webOS's chances on a "Slate device" but not on the Slate device.
McKinney also broke out both a Palm Pre and a Palm Pixi, but the most interesting thing he pulled out during his speech was a rolled-up flexible display. What you're looking at is something from deep inside HP's R&D, it's similar to E-Ink, printed on Mylar, and essentially can be made into any size you can imagine, from handset on up to an entire wall. It's full color and low-power, but more notably it's a far-in-the-future kind of thing, don't expect flexible display devices in the short or even medium term. The display that McKinney showed is still fairly fragile, even rolled up in a protective tube it managed to collect some kinds and flaws.
The takeaway? While HP really is dedicated to webOS smartphones, this flexible display technology is a sign that HP is thinking big about mobility.
McKinney's goal for webOS is to break out of the spectrum of devices with television on one end and featurephones on the other, to create something that is both richly immersive and highly mobile with fewer tradeoffs than what current devices face. That asterisk off in the upper right, unbound from the line of non-mobile-but-rich televisions and highly-mobile-but-boring featurephones is the target.
