The report here on bigger and better mobile phone displays does not say they can’t happen. It says they are taking too long. This is great news for learning. Millions of kids around the globe are already mobile phone equipped. Their standard learning device is looking more and more like it will be their phones. This means the delivery of learning could leapfrog the delay of waiting for the PCs or laptops to get to the world’s young learners.
But there’s more: the last paragraph of the article makes the exciting statement that we may have rollable pocket displays by 2007!
The genuine expectation of roll-up screens has not sunk in yet to public awareness — much less at the cutting edge of education thinking. Probably subjectively, most of us think the little screens are too small to be the main thing in learning. The above illustrations from Polymer Vision belie our doubts. It is all too easy to think of future mobiles as either laptops (which are modified PCs) or mobile phones (the descendants of the old rotary models).
The functional ancestor of the rollable screens is paper! How cool is that! We need to make the shift in thinking scribes once faced when they realized they no longer had to chisel stone or draw with sticks in mud — when somebody figured out how to chew up papyrus weed and roll out paper.
Thanks Greg!
February 9th, 2006 at 9:17 am