This Could Be The Most Portable Computer Ever

Take away the traditional rigidity of the tablet PC form factor, and everything becomes much more portable.

Before anything can claim the "most" title, it has to exist. The eRoll remains a figment of designer Dragan Trencevski's  imagination, and the concept isn't exactly new. Anyone remember that Mars movie Red Planet (the one with Carrie-Anne Moss)? Such a contraption was used as a portable X-Ray to determine the injuries on a felled astronaut, with the built-in touchscreen allowing easy manipulation.

With companies like Sony lining up technologies that can make this design a reality, it would do us good to explore eRoll's merits. There's no doubt the ability to roll everything up into a compact... roll makes for a portable gadget, but will everyday use prove unwieldy?

Flexible displays are great, because they fit into a space much smaller than the full visual real estate. But a floppy medium is always hard to use if you don't have a solid base underneath—unless a mechanism makes the screen rigid for user consumption.

In any case, the eRoll concept needs one significant improvement before it flies in our book: the main unit where the display rolls into needs to be smaller. Yes there needs to be room for the components, but miniaturization has never met a form factor it didn't like.

Rolling Up the eBook