Now, a PaperPhone to compete with smartphones

Extremely lightweight and made out of a thin-film, the prototype device can do everything a smartphone currently does- from making calls to playing music to sharing books.

And most impressively, the PaperPhone uses no power when nobody is interacting with it, the Daily Mail reported.

"This is the future. Everything is going to look and feel like this within five years," said its inventor Dr Roel Vertegaal, director of Queen`s University Human Media Lab in Kingston, Ontario.

"This computer looks, feels and operates like a small sheet of interactive paper, meaning that when users are reading they don`t feel like they are holding a sheet of glass or metal.

"You interact with it by bending it into a cell phone, flipping the corner to turn pages, or writing on it with a pen."

The phone`s display consists of a 9.5cm diagonal, thin-film flexible E Ink display which, according to the researcher, makes it much more portable that any current mobile computer.

Being able to store and interact with documents on larger versions of these light, flexible computers means offices will no longer require paper or printers, said Dr Vertegaal.

He said: "The paperless office is here.

"Everything can be stored digitally and you can place these computers on top of each other just like a stack of paper, or throw them around the desk."

The new device will be unveiled at the Association of Computing Machinery`s Computer Human Interaction conference next week in Vancouver.