Granted, this is partially my fault—I didn't keep it in the ugly cover that comes with the Kindle, just like I don't lock my iPhone or any other gadget in disfiguring covers, since I'm all about naked gadgets (almost entirely for aesthetic reasons), and I thought my bag's padded sleeve provided sufficient protection. Apparently it does not when you have a heavy DSLR on the other side of the stuffing and some guy slams into your bag.

A book made out of dead trees would've buckled and creased and returned to its original shape. So would a reader with a flexible display like Plastic Logic's, which at one point was said to withstand getting smacked by a shoe. Which actually takes it one step closer to emulating books than the more fragile Kindle or any other E-Ink powered reader—too bad Plastic Logic's reader is about a year away. (Though it says something about the Kindle that I'd sort of taken to treating it almost like a real book, and that this is the first time I'd actually materially felt the gap between it and paper.)

The story for other kinds of flexible displays, like bendy OLED, is actually even more depressing, since "progress" at this point means they're now 5 years away. Given how easy it is break screens, and how much we depend on them now—witness the slow recession buttons, though I'm sure they'll experience a retro counter-touch resurgence—rugged displays that we can treat like organic materials instead of delicate magic under the constant threat of destruction by mere everyday living might be more revolutionary than expected.

Or maybe I'll just have to learn to be more careful. [Giz's Kindle Review]

Samsung couldn't accomplish this with a normal glass substrate for obvious reasons, so they pioneered a new "sputtering" technique to coat the panel with a flexible membrane. Here's how it goes: a block of the coating material is blasted with an ion gun, causing it to eject bits of itself into an thermodynamically unbalanced cloud of atoms, which then cling to and form a film on anything else in the vacuum chamber — namely, this floppety panel.

This looks like it is just a one-off, unpriced expo unit, but at least we know it's possible. This tech come interesting close in capability to Samsung's other recently demonstrated ultra-thin color display, so we might have the beginning of an confusing display tech overlap. Cool, Samsung. Please sort that out, and wake me up when my shirt is a TV. [TechOn via OLED Display]

Professor Vertegaal forsees drink cans with RSS feeds or movie trailers, and touch-sensitive computers that change shape when you need them for different purposes. It's a combination of three-dimensional multi-touch, flexible display technology and smart materials like e-ink. Vertegaal even compares our use of current "flat" computer technology to life in the novel Flatland, and argues that the future is going to be about 3D computing and displays.

To this end, his Human Media Laboratory at Queens University is working on projects and prototypes of these things for real. There's a Coke can with RSS feed; a completely foldable paper computer, which lets you navigate an ebook much more "naturally" by turning the pages; and a workbench that simulates a display on any object, using front-projection for now, but with the aim of having stand-alone devices when the technology catches up.

This last sort of multi-shaped, smart material computer "would be a final frontier in the design of computer interfaces that turn the natural world into software, and software into the natural world" he says, in an upcoming publication in the Communications of Association of Computing Machinery. And yes, it all seems very neat, but do we really want animated movie clips on our morning box of Cheerios? What do you think, guys? [Physorg via ]

Intel is Working on Flexible Screen for Mobile Devices [Unwired View]