Sunday 13 January 2013

Samsung showcases flexible OLED displays

We have been hearing rumors of these for a while now but Samsung has finally come clean with their YOUM flexible OLED displays at CES this year.

Although no actual product using these displays have been announced so far, Samsung did showcase three applications of it. One of them had the design of a regular smartphone, with just the right edge being bent downwards. This bent strip displayed content in landscape mode, so that even if you have the phone in a case, you can see notifications and such from the side at a glance.


The other two designs included a device that couple be folded up in the middle and another one where the display could be rolled up and retracted.

Thanks to the flexibility of the display, we might finally start seeing some disruption in the design of smartphones, which have turned into boring slabs over the past years. The flexibility also means that these displays are a lot more shock resistant. It remains to be seen what product Samsung would choose to put it in first.

Google Maps accessible once again on Windows Phone browser

Last week we reported that the mobile web version of Google Maps service was no longer accessible through the Internet Explorer browser on Windows Phone devices. Although the service wasn’t officially supported because Internet Explorer does not run on the WebKit engine that the site is optimized for, it did used to work somehow until Google pulled the plug, citing incompatibility reasons.




Now, one week and lots of outrage later, the Google Maps website is once again accessible through Internet Explorer on Windows Phone. Admittedly, it won’t run as flawlessly as it does on iOS or Android devices because it’s still optimized for WebKit but at least you can use it now.

No reason has been given this time as to why this functionality was suddenly restored.