Revolutionary Plastics May See Laptops Bend

When you hear ‘plastic’ the first thing that probably comes to your mind is ‘electrical insulator’. This is perhaps because most plastics have exceptional electrical insulator properties, albeit this doesn’t necessarily mean that all plastics share the same properties. It was proven some three decades ago that certain classes of plastics may conduct electricity and could be used to create some of the most amazing electronic devices ever seen, such as flexible laptops, electronic billboards or ultra-thin displays.

Imagine an electronic device made of plastic material only. The creation of such a piece of equipment would most certainly revolutionize the electronics industry. Let’s take the humble transistor for example, the building block of every electronic device today. Although it is usually made out of silicon, a lot of semiconductor materials can be used to manufacture transistors, neither of which very flexible. However, flexibility is not the only issue with transistors. By using plastics to build transistors the manufacturing costs could also drop considerably. Read More »

Amazon’s Amazing e-book

It’s called Kindle and quite honestly it looks like something that was designed 20 years ago but as e-books go this one has got quite a lot going for it. To begin with it comes from Amazon, and if anyone is going to get the e-book market started it’s them. The actual display is every bit as good as rival designs from Sony and Philips, and the price at around £200 is on the right side of reasonable. As with other e-books the display draws negligible power virtually none when a page is displayed it’s very easy to use, but the killer feature is built-in Wi-Fi, which means no messing around with PCs to download your favourite book, and with around 90,000 currently available, there’s bound to be something worth reading. So will it catch on? Difficult to say at this very early stage of the game, but it’s definitely starting to get interesting.