Naturally we’ve seen more than just lots of Springdale and Canterwoord motherboards, there were a few manufacturers that had some innovative products on display that have not yet or just made it to the market. One such manufacturer was Philips, they had a large booth with lots of new technology, most of which focused on optical devices. Of course they’re part of the Blu-Ray partnership, just like Sony, and thus they’re also working on Blu-Ray devices. One of the smallest Blu-Ray devices was the Philips Portable Blue which uses a coin sized disk to store more than a GB of data. We’ve got plenty more to tell you about the Portable Blue but that’s beyond the scope of this report and we’ll have a follow-up article prepared soon.



Fig 14. The Philips Portable Blue, facilitating 1GB of storage capacity on a coin-sized optical disk using Blu-Ray technology.



Fig 15. The optical drive, featuring a number of very small components such as the optics and the actuator.

Philips didn’t stop there as they had some other promising technologies to show. One of which is their organic LED, or O-LED/Poly displays. They had several on display which either featured monochrome of color output and a good example of a shipping application for the technology in the form of a Philipshave electric razor. They also had a working E-book using E-Ink technology which really impressed me as the clarity, sharpness and contrast is beyond what I expected.



Fig 16. A Philips O-LED/Poly display, this monochrome display is just a few mm thick and is actually printed on the glass surface.



Fig 17. The E-book from Philips/E-Ink closely resembling traditional paper and ink, until the pages refreshed with new content.



Fig 18. A number of DVD recorders, now also available in slim line format, again with flat panel displays.

Naturally Philips had a whole range of other products that they were showing including a number of DVD recorders an naturally their new Streaming internet radio hifi sets. They also had a number of other technological innovations that were impossible to capture with a camera, such as a LCD screen with LED backlight instead of a fluorescent tube, which allows for much better contrast and brightness control, and of course, is much more durable.