What's the curve (Score 2, Interesting)

A couple of things about electronic paper. The displays are too slow to be used for anything other than static display of information at this time. The screen needs to refresh in it's entirety whenever anything changes on the page. That takes almost a second and is combined with some flicker. Hence the display cannot keep up with typing speed, and is useless for interactivity.

The electronic paper would therefore always be a secondary display, for static information. Obvious usage examples are to extend the display area of mobile devices such as phones or PDA's. The interesting thing is that for such applications the curvature of the bend of the electronic paper is a key issue. You see, if the curvature is not big enough, the paper will not roll-up into the device whilst keeping the device size small.

By the looks of the photo in the article, the curvature is nowhere near good enough to allow the paper to be rolled into a small radius roll of paper that would comfortably fit in a hand-held device design.