Fold a phone

As you may have noticed, Gadgetbox was AWOL last week. As much as I’d like to take full responsibility and say that it was completely my fault, that’s simply just not true. The truth is I was being worked to the bone, forced to tramp around a crowded convention hall until I broke into tears and fled the scene. They found me hours later, curled in a fetal ball, hidden in a niche of the Crumpler Castle. So, you see, totally not my fault in the slightest.

Never fear: we’re back with a special Thursday edition of everybody’s favorite gadget blog—we are your favorite, right? We’ve got plenty in store for you, too, from a foldable cell phone, to Spider-Man’s power strip of choice, to a hard drive enclosure for the truly paranoid.

This cell phone folds like a bad poker player

I thought we’d mentioned the Readius concept cell phone a while back, but I could find no record of it in a painstsking search of the official Gadgetbox archives (er, rhymes with Schmoogle). Had I written about it before, in some parallel dimension, I think I almost certainly would have thrown out an ill-advised reference to Earth: Final Conflict. You never saw it? They had these foldable…screen…

Never mind.

The Readius, developed by Philips spin-off Polymer Vision, features a 5” foldable e-paper screen capable of displaying 16 shades of grey, similar to Amazon’s Kindle. The device is intended as a combination e-book and cell phone, which might seem like a curious mix of functionality until you remember that at one point, cell phones and cameras probably seemed like a weird combination too. Frankly, I say that if the British can eat—and like—beans on toast, pretty much any other combination is perfectly valid.

The foldable screen on the Readius is far and away its most interesting feature, but since it’ll lack color at the outset, and won’t be able to play video, it’ll be interesting to see how this device fares against most average cell phones. Polymer is touting 30 hour battery life for reading, which sounds good, though I wonder how much cell phone usage will eat out of that, especially as they’re using 3G HSDPA technology. Just for kicks, they’ve also thrown in an MP3 player for music and podcasts and support for Bluetooth 2.0 and USB 2.0—all in a package weighing in at just 115 grams.

If this device seems like vaporware, don’t fret: it’s going into production now and is due to ship in the middle of the year. There’s no news on whether it’ll make it to the US or what the price will be, though the company’s CEO said it would be comparable to “a high-end mobile phone.” We’re thinking in the $500-$700 range.