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Tablets with paper-thin screens that can be folded and tucked into your back pocket, artificial intelligence and augmented reality – the stuff of science fiction may be coming to a store near you.

It’s been two years since Apple launched the iPad and spawned rival tablets from Samsung Electronics, Amazon, Sony, and now Google and Microsoft.

Much of the competition so far has centred on making smartphone and tablets lighter, slimmer, faster and longer-running than their predecessors, and the trend shows no signs of slowing.

The increasingly crowded marketplace is also galvanising hardware designers and software engineers to explore new technologies that may revolutionise the look and feel of mobile devices in coming years. Some researchers are experimenting with wearable devices, such as Google Glass, a stamp-sized electronic screen mounted on eyeglass frames to record video, access email and surf the web, as featured in last week’s GulfWeekly. Organic-light-emitting diodes, or OLED, is widely touted as the successor to liquid crystal displays. The main attraction of OLED is that the technology could one day allow tablets to be folded or rolled up like a newspaper.

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