Missing In Canada is a weekly feature where I will profile gadgets from other countries, consumer items that aren’t available here and (except for rare import shoppes) probably never will be.

This week we travel to China where Aiko Electronics has unveiled a new screen that can quickly transition from being a reflective mirror to a brightly lit LCD display. The KO Digital RM 2300 is a small, portable device capable of storing and playing music, photos, e-books, and movies. That itself is a fairly common set of features, but it’s the unusual screen that gives it a unique and desirable aesthetic. The glass on the player’s display has been tinted with a special plasma coating. When the device is turned off, the coating becomes opaque, reflecting the light of the world around it. Combined with the polished, metallic casing, it creates the illusion that the screen has simply disappeared.

When you turn on the player, the screen illuminates and the plasma costing, now hit with light from behind, becomes transparent, making the screen visible. It’s a trick that has been used before, although for more humble purposes. LG’s Shine cellphone uses a similar technique on its external LCD screen, displaying the time and incoming calls when powered on and an impenetrable mirror when powered off. The current wisdom is that such displays, while acceptable for digital read-outs and displaying simple information, aren’t quite transparent enough for viewing pictures or watching movies, that the plasma coating adds a dimness, reducing the screen’s clarity enough to make it less desirable than normal mobile LCD screens.

Aiko’s promotional artwork seems to suggest they’ve cracked the problem, digital photos and video sequences look very bright and clear. Even if the display isn’t perfect, it might be enough for use as a Portable Media Player. We’ll have to wait until Aiko launches it under their KO Digital brand in China for consumers there to try it out and see how well it lives up to the marketing claims. One drawback, the player uses conventional side button controls. There’s no touchscreen or touch-sensitive buttons, which you might expect at first glance.

The KO RM2300 supports MP3, WMA, OGG, AAC, APE, and FLAC lossless audio formats, MP4, RM, RMVB, AVI, FLV video formats, plus several digital picture and e-Book file formats. It includes a TV-out function, so you can use it to play videos on your television, and you can multi-task, playing music files while reading e-Books for example.

KO Digital Technology's home page

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