Canadian 'Paperphone' Set To Debut

Thin and flexible prototype could be a glimpse of what the future holds for computers and phones.

Canadian researchers are getting ready to unveil a smartphone as thin and flimsy as a sheet of paper at a conference next week in Vancouver. The team from Queen's University spent eight years developing a prototype of the “Paperphone," which will have many of the functions and gadgets of most contemporary smartphones, albeit much, much thinner. Users bend the sheet to navigate the phone, can place a call by curving it, and hang up by flattening it out. The flexible film phone will debut at the Computer Human Interaction conference on Tuesday, but the researchers say the phone is still not ready to be publicly available.