Who cares that the Apple iPhone 4 is made of glass and shiny metal? Or if the white iPhone isn’t any thicker than the black one? In five years time, your next smart phone could be literally paper-thin.

The PaperPhone was developed by researchers at Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada and at Arizona State University as a harbinger of smart phones in the near future. Working with E Ink Corporation, which produces the E Ink screens used on e-book readers such as the Amazon Kindle, the researchers’ prototype phone can perform like a standard smart phone, placing calls and accessing the Web.

Thee flexible display allows users to control the PaperPhone by simply bending the screen. Bending a corner of the screen, for example, will enable the PaperPhone to turn pages of an e-book on its display.

Dr. Roel Vertegaal, the director of Queen’s University Human Media Lab and one of the PaperPhone’s creators, said, “This is the future. Everything is going to look and feel like this within five years.”

Take a look at the PaperPhone video (embedded below), produced by the scientists at the Human Media Lab. Now if only the mad scientists could combine this with other technology–say, recharging batteries by simply talking?

Revolutionary new paper computer shows flexible future for smartphones and tablets [Queen’s University]
This Paper-Thin Phone Will Soon Look Primitive [Time]
First-generation paper phone introduced [KGO-TV, ABC San Francisco]

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