Like many of the e-book readers that followed, it used e-ink - an innovation developed by a US company of the same name.
The screens are black and white, and work by reflecting natural light instead of glowing themselves, mimicking the way text looks in paper books.
"There are about 30 million flexible e-ink displays in the field today - the oldest working ones are from 2006," says Sri Peruvemba of E-Ink.
"They [are] well-suited for simple phones, memory and battery indicators, smart credit cards, wristwatches, and signs."
But why are most e-ink displays hidden behind a rigid glass screen and not made bendy?
One reason is cost, says Abhigyan Sengupta, an analyst with consultancy firm MarketsAndMarkets, which recently published a global study on flexible displays.
To have a fully flexible finished product, both parts of the display have to be flexible - the optical frontplane and the backplane, where transistors are - as well as the device's battery, the outer shell, the touchscreen and other components.
The material was first produced in 2004 by Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov, two Russian-born scientists at the University of Manchester.
Graphene is a sheet of carbon just one atom thick - yet it is stronger than diamond, transparent, lightweight, has great conducting properties - and is flexible.
Researchers believe that graphene may in future replace silicon and revolutionise electronics as we know it.
"We are working on flexible, bendable and transparent displays and surfaces that could in future be part of flexible phones, tablets, TVs and solar cells," says Prof Ferrari, who is working with Finnish phonemaker Nokia.
"Samsung is really quite advanced in this field, but we here in Cambridge have done some great work on Nokia's prototypes as well."
He says that graphene will complement and highly enhance the performance of OLED-type flexible phones, because in theory, even a handset's flexible battery can be made out of this material.
Whatever the technology, it seems certain that very soon our phones will be not just smart, but bendy too.