Score one for Canadian researchers and ingenuity! Oh, and Intel and Plastic Logic helped out a little bit 😉 It’s known as the PaperTab, a revolutionary concept which builds on the paper-thin smartphone and recent advances in AMOLED flexible displays. The design made the rounds at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, and it turned quite a few heads!

As already noted, the PaperTab incorporates the latest in display and flexible technology to create a 10.7-inch e-ink touchscreen display, powered by a Core i5 processor. Users control it by bending and flexing, touching the screen, and tapping one tab to the next. But instead of using it like a normal tablet, the idea is that you have lots of PaperTabs, with each tablet representing a different app – such as email, a typeface, a browser, a and so on.

This might sound like a bit of a downgrade, but the coolest thing about this new computing paradigm is that each PaperTab is aware of other PaperTabs in its proximity. You might push two PaperTabs together to extend an app onto two screens, or you could attach a file to an email by simply tapping one PaperTab on another. In this way, a PaperTab functions like an ordinary document, but with the added benefit of being electronic and transferable.

As it stands, the concept is merely a tech demo being put on by researchers from Queen’s University and corporate reps from Intel and Plastic Logic. No other information is currently available from any of these sources, but it’s likely more will trickle down to the market now that CES 2013 has wrapped up and they don’t need to keep us guessing anymore. And if I were a betting man, I’d say they’ll be available in packs of five or ten, for roughly the same price as an IPad 7 since they’ll probably be coming out at the same time.

Check out the video below of the PaperTab on display at CES 2013 and the demo the team provided: