Meet the Bendable Phablet You Wear on Your Arm
For the past few years, the standing lazy punchline about wearables has been something about awkwardly strapping a computer or a phone to your body. Finally, a crowdfunding campaign has taken the joke to the next level and made that punchline a reality.
San Francisco Bay Area startup Arubixs has designed a flexible screen phablet dubbed “Portal” that slides into a dual-strap arm cradle that extends about halfway up the forearm from the wrist. It seems equal parts brilliant and ridiculous. We’ve seen flexible displays like this for years now – mostly as demonstration models at CES that never make it to market – but this is the first design that’s built entirely around the flexibility of the screen.
“Current wearable offerings and even the new Apple Watch are just too small to text on or do anything really practical,” Arubixs founder Brandon Mairs told CNET via email. “This (Portal) is not just a wearable. It’s a smartphone you can wear. So when the phone is not in the cradle it’s just a thin, 6-inch smartphone that’s flexible, water resistant and shatterproof.”
While the idea of essentially strapping a bendable phone the size of a Galaxy Note to your arm seems like it would be a tough sell even in a futuristic sci-fi universe, the Portal’s specs are hard to ignore.
Arubixs claims its 6-inch TFT display is also scratch-resistant and reinforced by a flexible Kevlar exterior. It has 2GB RAM, a total of four cameras, 64GB of storage, a full suite of sensors, NFC, Bluetooth, LTE, wireless charging and a proprietary 3,200mAh flexible battery. The processor is yet to be determined. Portal will run a skinned version of Android and respond to touch, gesture and motion-based commands.