If you read the high-tech/gadget websites, you may seen this week that Sony debtued an OLED, flexible TV screen. The little beaut is 2.5 inches and weighs less than 0.05 ounces!
Seeing this, I was immediately reminded of my article from a few weeks back about personal digital frames that might go inside wallets, lockets, or other small, personal items.
The debut of this kind of display seems to me to make the digital frames I speculated about much more likely. If your screen can bend and flex without damage, and still show an image, the applications of a digital frame become much broader.
Sony’s expecting to put these displays into use in TVs this year. Hopefully some enteprising frame marker will see the potential for these soon after and stretch the boundaries of the digital frame.
Despite the recent advances in really big displays, technological progress, at least in consumer electronics, usually involves making things smaller. LP becomes CD becomes MP3, VHS becomes DVD, and so on.
While there is substantial interest in making digital picture frames larger, what about personal portable frames?
We’ve already seen a few small frames released. These frames are wallet sized, fit on a keychain, or in a locket. And they’re cool. They’d be even cooler (like almost anything else) if they were connected to the Internet.
But are these devices, with their tiny screens and need to be lightweight and battery efficient, good bets to go wireless? Maybe.
Recently, we featured a digital picture frame that fit inside a wallet. Imagine the possibilities for a wireless version of this device. It could:
- Offer up-to-the-minute bank account or credit card balances
- A running tally of your personal budget to help you decide if it really is OK to splurge on that HDTV as an impulse buy
- Feature pictures of your family (this would be especially great if you’ve got a new baby. New photos could be streamed to the wallet as the day goes on, helping parents miss less of the kid’s life as they work)
- Take the place of rarely changing membership cards, saving both money and environmental resources. Who needs a new insurance card every 6-12 months or a car dealership service card when they could be electronic?
- Show non-profit group memberships, saving the groups money on printing and mailing, and giving notice when your membership is about to expire
There are obstacles to overcome before your wallet goes all digital, of course.
Wireless components and service will need to become a lot smaller, lighter, cheaper, and more ubiquitous before this would begin to make sense. This is especially true for locket-sized frames.
Reliability would need to be improved, too. Obviously no one’s going to be happy about their wallet crashing.
These kinds of frame/service combinations will probably not become widely used for quite some time, if ever. More standard wireless digital picture frames will likely come to the home or office long before they get into our wallets or around our necks. Still, it would be pretty cool.
