Laptops keep getting thinner and lighter, but some concept laptops take portable to a new level. Orkin Design's Rolltop consists of an OLED display that can start as a rolled-up mat and deploy as a multi-touch 17-inch laptop. My beastly HP laptop just shed a tear of envy.
The Orkin laptop can also transform into a tablet PC operable with a stylus, or become a standup flat screen display. A power adapter and other features fit with the carrying canister that comes with a convenient holding strap.
CEATEC in Japan was bursting with techno gadgets. Some were full-fledged products with price tags, others simply way-out science experiments. Launch the gallery here for a quick roundup of things from both categories.
For our complete coverage of the show, click here. —Sean Captain
By Sean CaptainPosted 10.04.2007 at 10:04 am4 Comments
While in Tokyo for CEATEC, I made the pilgrimage to Casio headquarters and geeked out at their museum. I saw the world's first electronic calculator (about the size of a toaster oven) and also the first digital camera with—if you can believe it—an LCD screen on the back.
But my real purpose was to meet with the father of that old camera, Jin Nakayama, to see his latest offspring. It's so new, in fact, they haven’t chosen a name yet. But it’s the wildest camera I've ever seen. By mating a high-performance CMOS image sensor with a new, lightening-fast processor, the camera can shoot up to 60 (yes, 60) six-megapixel photos per second or—get this—300 video frames per second. That’s National Geographic-style slow-mo video from a consumer camera. Well, if Casio goes ahead and builds a consumer camera. For now, it’s just a science experiment. But the prototype I saw looks pretty darn close to a real product.
Enough talking. If a picture's worth a thousand words, this 300-picture-per-second clip of me drinking water is the Magna Carta.—Sean Captain
In our December issue, Popular Science names the 100 best innovations of the year: bombproof wallpaper, self-parking cars, the fastest helicopter, and 97 more. Plus inventor profiles and videos.