PHONE Magazine’s sister site SlashGear got some hands-on with Polymer Vision’s “Readius” at Mobile World Congress (formerly called 3GSM). At the time, Readius was only a prototype, and now, it’s all grown up and currently in production.

Readius is barely the size of other cellphones on the market, featuring the world’s first 5-inch fold out display. Tuck the screen away when you don’t need it, and then roll it out when you want to surf the Internet, read your email or text your wife. Polymer vision is positioning Readius to compete against the Apple iPhone and even crossing over to take on Amazon’s eBook reader Kindle when it hits stores in mid-2008.

As far as price goes, Karl McGoldrick, chief executive of the venture capital-funded firm wouldn’t say how much, but said it would be comparable to a high-end mobile phone. I would guess in the neighborhood of $550 to mid $700 range.

McGoldrick continued to share that his “dream device”, which Polymer Vision planned to build within 5 years, was a mobile phone with an 8-inch color display that could show video. Wait a minute; will the 5-incher black and white rollout display show video – or no? It may not. Similar to Amazon’s Kindle, the Readius has a so-called electronic paper screen that displays black and white text and images. I’d imagine that it would be fairly difficult to show videos at the moment. This is definitely something I’ll have to ask him at Mobile World Congress next month.

As expected, the Readius will make phone calls and capable of connecting to the Internet using 3G networks with high data speeds. The only draw back I can see is having to setup our email accounts, news sources, podcasts, audio books and blog feeds on your laptop or desktops where the data is then pushed to the device. According to McGoldrick the company opted to use this method because it was simpler in a mobile environment. My answer? Simply because there’s no way for the screen or device to accept user inputs yet – silly! However, he did comment that the company plans to add a keypad to future models and seems to be proud that there are only eight buttons all together.

[via Reuters and SlashGear]