Omron aims to make your cellphone even thinner

Mitsubishi has already shown a prototype cellphone screen that uses two alternately flashing backlights to show a different image front and back; now Omron has come along with their take on the idea, the Reversible Light. Instead of the usual clamshell phone setup, where a main and subdisplay (plus a backlight for each) are mounted in the handset, they posit a setup where you'd have a single display serving as both main and sub, with the Reversible Light acting as backlight when you looked at the main and frontlight when you viewed the sub, if that makes sense. (The display and light are the left and right blocks in the diagram, if that helps.) The obvious advantage is halving the thickness of the display components needed, though with more and more stuff being crammed into cellphones we worry that clamshells of the future could end up looking distinctly bottom-heavy.