Samsung smartphones with flexible, folding screens could soon be a reality

Businesss Standard : Samsung's flexible OLED screen is likely to be have the most basic level of flexibility.

We rarely see a truly remarkable new technology more than once a decade. After years of undelivered promises, such a technology looks finally set to enter the market: the flexible computer screen.

Imagine, a tablet display you can fold up and put in your pocket, a smartwatch whose strap is the screen, or a handbag that is also a monitor and keyboard. Nokia originally called this proposed technology “Morph” back in 2008 because of the plethora of applications it would make possible. Now it looks like it will become a reality.

After nearly two decades of work, Samsung is rumoured to be getting ready for the launch of the first flexible smartphone. The company’s head of mobile recently said it was “time to deliver” such a phone, and that the development process for it was “nearly concluded”.

But perhaps more significantly, the Samsung Display division of the company recently said it had developed an “unbreakable smartphone panel” that had passed rigorous safety testing. Even after being subjected to temperatures of 71˚C and -32˚C, and dropped from a height of 1.8 metres, the display showed no signs of damage and functioned normally.

This display is a flexible organic light emitting diode (OLED) panel made of an unbreakable surface with a plastic overlay window attached to it, making it simultaneously lightweight and tough as glass but a lot more robust. Manufacturers have yearned for many years to make displays with flexible, bendable properties and a paper-like feel with electronic functionality. If Samsung has truly found a way to protect a flexible OLED then it has solved a major technical challenge in removing the need for the glass screens used on most other displays today.

Glass was originally needed to actually stop displays from bending. Old-fashioned liquid crystal displays easily distorted when bent because the molecules in the liquid inside them would become misaligned. Today’s OLED screens are based on a solid layer of light-emitting material that doesn’t easily distort in this way. But glass is also used to protect the organic molecules in an OLED display from being degraded by water vapour and other gases that would shorten their lifespan.

Until now, encapsulating displays in flexible plastic hasn’t been enough to protect them.

A more advanced, better quality kind of screen known as a quantum dot light emitting diode (QLED) display can also be made flexible. These use nano-crystals to produce high-quality, pure and sharp monochromatic light. They convert the backlight into the pure basic colours without the use of filters. But encapsulating QLED displays is even harder than OLEDs and so are likely to take a lot longer to turn into a flexible product....Read More