September 5, 1997
By RICHARD LORANT
AP Business Writer
BOSTON (AP) -- A thimble-sized display screen planned for Motorola cellular phones takes downsizing to new heights.
After 12 years and $100 million in the making, CyberDisplay will enable callers to get a full page of e-mail or view a Web site without lugging around a laptop computer.
In a deal announced Thursday, Motorola said it planned to begin attaching the screen to phones, pagers and other products by late next year.
Shares of CyberDisplay's developer, Kopin Corp., shot up almost 9 percent on the news.
Several analysts said the tiny screen's high quality, low cost and miserly power consumption could inspire inventors to use it for a wide range of other applications.
But, as with everything in the budding field of portable computing, it is unclear how many people will actually buy the "smart phones" and other powerful tools now being developed.
"It could turn into nothing or in 10 years' time be as ubiquitous as a calculator or a digital watch," said Martin Reynolds of Dataquest Inc., a California research firm. "This device is so interesting that it could just lead to something else that nobody is thinking of."
The multimillion-dollar agreement with Motorola, the world's largest wireless company, was a boost for Kopin, of Taunton, Mass. Kopin signed a similar deal with the wireless unit of Siemens AG of Germany in June. A publicly traded company, Kopin has yet to turn a profit in the dozen years it has spent developing the CyberDisplay.
But its shares rose $1.87 to close at $23 a share Thursday on the Nasdaq Stock Market.
The device, which looks like the viewfinder on a video camera, is built around a liquid crystal display screen slightly larger than a grain of rice -- 0.28 inch in diameter.
Looking through the viewfinder from a few inches away, a user sees an image equivalent to one on a much larger screen. A full-page fax or e-mail message is readable, as is a graphics-rich Web site.
"The data's readable. It's not bad at all," said Diana Hwang, a senior industry analyst with International Data Corp. of Framingham, Mass., who has seen the display.
Someone can simultaneously talk on a phone affixed with the device and read an incoming fax, she said.
"It's meant to do information access and viewing, not sit there hours on end," she added.
Hwang said IDC projected strong growth in the demand for "smart phones" -- wireless phones that allow people to access address books, the Internet and other digital data.
The estimated 577,000 smart phones sold around the world this year will grow to 8.8 million units in the year 2002, she said.
But neither Kopin nor Motorola executives would hazard to guess at production or sales figures for the products.
"Nobody in the world knows how much," said John Fan, who founded Kopin with several other MIT engineers in 1984.
"It's like the early days of the PC or the Internet," he said. "We believe people want it. Our focus groups say they will. But until people buy it we don't know."
Hwang said the CyberDisplay is 1,000 times smaller than a laptop screen and uses 100 times less energy while delivering a resolution of 320 by 240 pixels. Kopin began marketing its monochrome model in May, and is ready to produce a color version.
Kopin manufactures its products in Westboro. A licensee, United Microelectronics Corp., also makes the devices in Taiwan.
For Motorola, based in Schaumburg, Ill., the device offers a chance enhance its display products.
"This alliance will allow us to get into color, be a leader in the market," said S.W. Cheung, vice president and general manager of the company's displays division.
Kopin went public in 1992. Since then it has lost more than $40.5 million.
After all those years of work, Fan, the company's founder, can be excused if he overstates his case a bit.
"All of a sudden, all this data that's flying around by wire or wireless can end up somewhere," he said. "I'm always thinking like an MIT guy. Wow, this is a new age now!"
