“Electronic Skin” Color Changing Surface
By Evan Ackerman
Cell phones are arguably separated into three categories: iPhone / Palm Pre / BlackBerry, phones that suck are functional for people who don’t care, and everything else. In the everything else category, what distinguishes one phone from another is often (for better or worse) looks, and a company called Kent Displays may have trumped that category with a phone that changes color.
The entire outer surface of this prototype phone is actually a display, called a cholesteric liquid crystal display. Sounds tasty, right? It is tasty… The display is durable, can be molded into any shape, and (eventually) will display 4,000 colors at a high (but unspecified) resolution. A jolt of electricity changes the color, and that’s all it takes: once the color is set, no power is required to keep it up.
This is, of course, the type of thing that you’re not likely to see anytime soon, but it does exist. Is it cheap? No idea about that either, but I’d be willing to pay a premium for a phone that I could set to match my mood. I’m feeling mauve today, how ’bout you?
