flexibility

Solar CIGS reach 18.7 percent efficiency

Swiss scientists have broken an energy conversion efficiency record for flexible thin-film CIGS solar cells, Empa, the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology, announced last week.

In collaboration with the Swiss solar start-up Flisom, Empa has achieved an 18.7 percent efficiency for CIGS (copper indium gallium selenide) flexible solar cells, which the lab says was made possible by mounting them on a polymer substrate. This breaks Empa's record of 17.6 percent when mounting the CIGS on steel foil substrates, according to the Swiss lab.

Solar efficiency is the amount of electricity per square inch that … Read more

Is your iPhone obsolete? Meet PaperPhone

How many times have you wanted to smash your phone when talking to annoying people? Thanks to research at Queen's University in Canada, you'll soon be able to crush that handset mercilessly. Well, almost.

The e-paper prototype PaperPhone has a 3.75-inch thin-film display and developers call it the world's first flexible smartphone (remember Nokia's patent application for one?). It can do everything a smartphone can, such as make calls, display books, and play music.

"This is the future. Everything is going to look and feel like this within five years," Queen's Human Media Lab Director Roel Vertegaal was quoted as saying in a release.

As seen in the vid below, the prototype is based on e-ink technology and is more like a bendable plastic sheet about the thickness of a conference badge. It can be operated by bending the corners to turn a page, squeezing to make a call, and even written on with a pen.

The lab has also been working on video game screens that are bent as a control input. … Read more

Teaching your iPad new positions: Hands-on with Joby Gorillamobile Ori, Yogi cases

Sometimes it feels like we've seen every iPad case in the universe--and then, there comes a weird new design that takes iPad culture to an even deeper level. Enter the Joby Gorillamobile Ori and Yogi cases, both of which transform--in different ways--into some positions that even made us blush.

We first got wind of these around CES, but we've finally gotten both into our office to check out in more detail. Both feature the same base iPad case--a rubber-reinforced plastic shell that snugly encases itself around the iPad, and offers some modicum of shock absorption (as we discovered … Read more

Avoiding the cost of entanglement

Modern IT is very focused on economics. We talk endlessly about cost. We debate capital costs vs. operational costs--CAPEX vs. OPEX, in the lingo. We look at Total Cost of Operations (TCO) and we try to calculate our projects' Return On Investment (ROI). But even with all of these economic metrics, we miss an enormous source of costs: Our long-term entanglement with the products, technologies, and approaches we choose.

Long ago, we had a bright idea. "We could represent the year portion of dates with just two digits--that would save space!" We happily did that for a few … Read more

CES: Samsung's bendable cell phone screen

LAS VEGAS--"Flexible" isn't something you'd think you needed in a cell phone screen, but CES is all about concepts and future applications in addition to big-name product releases.

That's why we were excited to see prototypes of two Samsung displays. One is a malleable screen you can actually bend in a wave or arc. The 4.5-inch screen has an impressive WVGA (800x480 pixel) resolution that you can curve. It's also paper-thin, less than 0.3mm thick.

We may have been a bit drastic with our photo shoot (see image above,) but there … Read more

iProp: A flexible floor stand for the iPad

Like the iPhone before it, the iPad is generating a cottage industry for accessories. Add to the list the rather unique iProp, which features a long, bendable neck and ball-and-socket connector that allows you to tilt and swivel your iPad in all directions.

As for specs, the full stand is 36 inches long (12 inches rigid/24 inches flexible) and it has a "heavy duty" base that weighs in at close to 4 pounds.

The iProp ships in February for $79.99. We look forward to testing it to see how stable the stand really is.

theiProp from … Read more

Peel me an e-book

The secret to building an inexpensive flexible computer display is not in the core components of the displays themselves. It's in the material those components are mounted on.

The fundamental elements of e-ink and OLED displays are small enough that they won't break if laid down on flexible backing. The problem, according to Janglin Chen of Taiwanese government-funded research lab ITRI, is the backing itself. The substrate the components are mounted onto has to have certain physical properties, especially during the manufacturing process. To date, the primary material on which displays have been layered has been glass, which … Read more

Rename-it-all

Naru's Flexible Renamer is a free tool for renaming files and folders, either singly or in large batches, including subfolders. It can rename items using a wide range of methods: copying, substituting, translating, moving, reordering, and attaching letters, numbers, and characters in specified or randomly generated patterns. It also supports Unicode strings for a wide range of languages. It has sophisticated, flexible filtering options to exclude or include items for processing, and it can modify file or folder information such as time and date stamp.

Flexible Renamer is a portable application that doesn't have to be installed: just … Read more

Seagate GoFlex: Portable storage goes superflexible

For a while, it has seemed impossible to design anything new or innovative when it comes to portable hard drives other than to increase their storage space or add minor features, like an e-label, in the case of the WD My Passport Studio. As it turns out, however, Seagate has been working on another major evolution.

The company announced Tuesday an entirely new line of storage solutions called FreeAgent GoFlex that emphasizes flexibility. The new storage family includes both portable and desktop external drives. Each comes with an array of cable adapters that allow it to quickly switch to difference interfaces. With this new family, the concept of an external hard drive has changed significantly.

Traditionally, an external hard drive has circuit boards with selective built-in ports for different interfaces. These interfaces includes USB 2.0, USB 3.0, FireWire 400, FireWire 800, and eSATA. Low-end or ultraportable drives generally support USB 2.0 only, whereas higher-end and desktop drives tend to support more interfaces. However, all of them share one common shortcoming: they are stuck with whatever ports they come with.

With Seagate's new FreeAgent GoFlex design, an external hard drive is now divided into two parts, the storage and the cable adapter. The storage part is just the hard drive itself with no circuit board. Essentially, it's like any internal SATA hard drive with a protective case. The second part is a small adapter that can be snapped-in tight on the first part to make it a complete external storage solution. The two connect via the standard SATA interface.

An adapter contains the circuit board that determines the functionality of the drive and can be designed to support different interfaces and features. Each FreeAgent GoFlex drive will come with a USB 2.0 adapter of its own and have the capability of working with any other adapters. This way, your new external hard drive can be quickly changed to support any interface or have any added features that Seagate offers.

The best thing about the new snap-in adapter design is that the adapters also work with any internal hard drives.… Read more