Whenever I hear someone talking about the future, it always seems to be five years away. Disc drives will be obsolete in five years, buttons will be obsolete in five years, landlines, you name it. Anything that's on its way out seems to have exactly five years from the present day to live. Maybe David Bowie is so deeply ingrained in our collective subconscious that it's no longer possible to give any other timeline for anything. Now a Queen's University researcher is claiming that paper-thin smartphones will be the norm in just five years.

Phones do evolve ever more quickly these days. Heck, I remember when color screens on phones were new, cool, and coveted. My first phone was a black and white Nokia with swappable faceplates. Those were the days. Flip phones were cool, then those little slider gadgets, then texting phones with full QWERTY keyboards. Now if you don't own a touchscreen telephone you might as well not even exist in the world. What happens next? Companies need to keep finding ways to feed their customer's eternal hunger for innovation. If everyone has a smartphone, it's not cool anymore. And smartphones have been cool for a while. Are we at a mobile tech plateau? The iPhone changed everything about the phone business four years ago but it hasn't evolved much past its original incarnation. Inventor Roel Vertegaal believes his thin, flexible phone technology may be the next step.

The paper phone remains very much a prototype, although it does function in its current stage. It uses e-ink, which means that its screen does not display colors. Instead of the touchscreen's tapping and swiping motions, three-dimensional manipulations are used to control the paper phone. You can bend a corner to signal a command. The problem is that bending is the only way to interact with the phone. It's not a very thin touchscreen; it's just not a touchscreen. The video demo shows how to program the phone to respond to your commands, but the corner-bending motion seems counterintuitive and awkward. Touchscreens caught on so widely because it makes sense to physically tap something you want to click on. We feel like we're reaching into the phone and manipulating what's inside even though we're just tapping on glass. The slight physics engine included in sliding gestures makes the phone feel real to us, makes its navigation pleasant. I'm not sure how bending the corner of a paper-thin phone will translate into a user-accessible experience. 

Vertegaal's claim that his invention will be all over the tech map in five years seems unlikely at best. But he's right that a new innovation is needed right around now to satisfy consumers. The best phones on the market are just black monoliths. There doesn't seem to be a way to improve upon them. You can't imbue their physical form with a flashy gimmick or body shape; you can only improve the OS. Maybe that's a good thing. Maybe we've hit the point where we actually care more about how well our phone works instead of how cool it looks. We're satisfied with tiny slabs of computing power and maybe that's not going to change for a while. I suppose it's indicative that our collective attention span isn't quite so bad as everyone fears when we settle upon something that works well for us for years at a time. 

(via Geekologie)