A smartphone made from electronic paper has been demonstrated by researchers in Canada.

The PaperPhone is flexible and can be controlled by being bent, written on or used as a touchscreen.

The PaperPhone, built to determine how people use a flexible device, is a collaboration between researchers from Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada, Arizona State University, USA, researchers from the E-Ink Corporation.

“This is the future. Everything is going to look and feel like this within five years,” Roel Vertegaal, director of the human media lab at Queen’s, said. “This computer looks, feels and operates like a small sheet of interactive paper.”

The epaper sheet, which uses the same e-Ink technology found in the Amazon Kindle ereader, is just millimetres thick and can be used to make phone calls, read ebooks and play music.

The researchers say that this technology could eventually mean the end of paper and printers. Dr Vertegaal 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.”

The PaperPhone will be displayed at the Association of Computing Machinery’s CHI 2011 conference in Vancouver, Canada, on May 10.

(Read by Lee Hannon. Lee Hannon is a journalist at the China Daily Website.)