Skip to main content

How It Works: Transparent Smartphones

Technology team, Mobile Geeks traveled to Taiwan this month and they had the first look at the world’s first transparent smartphone. I was looking through their review here, yesterday. Take a look at the video here:



As you can see the phone is still a prototype without any specific software on it. Also, the display doesn’t light up quite as visibly as other phones.

The maker of this particular device is Taiwan-based Polytron, about which we in the technology industry haven’t heard a lot. The company makes quite a number of electronic and optical vision glass products and one of them is trademarked Polyvision. This is a type of glass product that becomes transparent on electrification. See here:

Polyvision glass

Here’s how it works. When there is no electricity passing through the glass, the LCD molecules are aligned randomly causing the light to get scattered away, and the glass becomes opaque in a dull white color.

Polyvision opaque when not electrified

On the other hand, when there is electricity passing through the glass, the glass molecules get aligned properly and thus create a proper way for the light to pass through, ergo the glass becomes transparent.

Polyvision transparent when electrified

Polyvision is one of the players of this particular industry and it is not developed mainly for smartphones, but for home use, such as bathroom and shower curtains, optical shutter for bedroom, security windows, etc. When it comes to the world of smartphones, it is pretty innovative indeed. We will wait and see how the technology progresses.

Popular posts from this blog

Technologies on Smartphones That You Should Look For

Apple has unveiled two underwhelming products with iPhone 5S and 5C . That was the major news for the last week. Although the devices completely lacked any inspiration, they have included two very important things—the touch ID sensor for security and the 64-bit architecture for better computing. Earlier we also mentioned what Apple should have done . In Android devices, we have a huge number of innovations too that we got to see in the past few months. In this article, let me discuss a few innovations that you have to look for in your next smartphone. 1. NFC Near Field Communication has always been regarded as a cutting edge technology. You can’t throw a stone now without hitting an Android device with NFC technology. It is a secure way that devices can connect by simply bringing them together. Right now, NFC has yet to find applications in the current smartphone market. The technology is not new, although it has yet to have any big applications. However, NFC has its importance.

Five Great Alternatives for iGoogle Home Page Portal

Google’s popular home page service, iGoogle will be retired on November 1st, 2013. That’s a little over a year of managing your home page through this service. It came as a great disappointment to me since I had been using the service for a long time. I have a nice home page set up in iGoogle with news from BBC, CNN, and others; my calendar; a widget for time management; topic-specific news on technology, stock quotes, weather; and some other interesting stuff. It was a page that I woke up to for many days. It seems obvious that the popularity of home page services has been coming down in the recent years; another popular service in this arena, Netvibes has turned into something else entirely. I could have turned my attention to Netvibes after they retire iGoogle, but that won’t happen now. I will miss Google’s home page, and before that I want to find out another portal service that I could love as I do iGoogle. In search for one, I found these great services which can replace iG

A Tablet Running Both Windows and Android Side By Side

The latest innovation from Samsung is the ATIV Q tablet, a streamlined 13-inch tablet that is extremely powerful and not that chunky for a tight competitor to the likes of Microsoft Surface Pro. It is thin, extremely powerful, and has a large brilliant QHD resolution screen, which is higher than Full HD. QHD is 3200x1800 pixels, while FHD is 1920x1280 pixels. Let’s take a brief look at this device. Technical Specifications The tablet-laptop mash-up is not yet in the market. We may update this post as it is made available in the market. Here are the brief technical specifications of the tablet. Display 13.3 inch; 3200x1800 px (the highest in the market); 16 million colors Processor Intel Haswell Core i5 processor (details unknown) RAM 4 GB Graphics Intel HD 4000 Storage 128 GB SSD Battery life 9 hours of usage Operating system(s) Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean; Windows 8