Phone with fold-away screen launched

By Niclas Mika

EINDHOVEN, Netherlands (Reuters) - A Dutch company has squeezed a display the size of two business cards into a gadget no bigger than other mobile phones -- by making a screen that folds up when not in use.

The 5-inch (13-cm) display of Polymer Vision's "Readius" is the world's first that folds out when the user wants to read news, blogs or email and folds back together so that the device can fit into a pocket.

Polymer Vision, spun out of Philips (PHG.AS), whetted the appetite of gadget fans more than two years ago when it showed off a prototype. Now the gadget is in production and will go head-to-head with Apple's (AAPL.O) iPhone and Amazon's (AMZN.O) ebook reader Kindle when it hits stores mid-2008.

"You get the large display of e-reading, the super battery life of e-reading, and the high-end connectivity ... and the form factor and weight of a mobile phone," said Karl McGoldrick, chief executive of the venture capital-funded firm, in which Philips still has a 25 percent stake.

"We are taking e-reading and bringing it to the mobile phone."

He would not say how much the Readius would cost, but said it would be comparable to a high-end mobile phone.

McGoldrick said his "dream device," which the company planned to build within 5 years, was a mobile phone with an 8-inch color display that could show video.

Like Amazon's Kindle, the Readius has a so-called electronic paper screen, which displays black-and-white text and images that look almost like they have been printed on paper.