Can the “Unbreakable Panel” keep Samsung’s Super AMOLED screens safe?

For the longest time, smartphone makers have used glass to protect the underlying display from damage. Could plastic be the future?

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New sources confirm Samsung could soon mass-produce foldable phones, but it may not want to

We already expressed our skepticism over the feasibility of Samsung’s rumored plan to build as many as 10 million foldable smartphones a month starting sometime in H2 2017, and a fresh Korean media report highlights the chaebol’s very understandable “caution.”

It’s not that Samsung couldn’t mass-manufacture and sell the so-called Galaxy X on a relatively large scale next year, considering how long it’s been since R&D kicked off and all the technological progresses made in the meantime. But the company, still reeling from the Note 7 fiasco, may simply not want to take the risk of there not being sufficient market demand for obviously costly flexible devices.

Low yields for several essential components helping with elasticity and robustness also have to be carefully examined, possibly leading to reduced profitability, and at the end of the day, even if “Project Valley” is cleared for takeoff in the near future, odds are the first commercial product will be a foldable tablet, not a phone. With an outward, not inward, curved panel, and non-rollable battery “placed in the flat sides instead of folded areas.”

You’d still be looking at a groundbreaking gadget flaunting new standard-setting flexibility and resistance to hard impacts, so in case Samsung indeed has doubts about customer interest, let your voices be heard in the comments section below. Wouldn’t you just love, say, a 7-incher capable of seamlessly turning into a 5-incher for improved pocketability?

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Possible foldable Samsung smartphone design detailed in new patent, as mass production draws near

Believe it or not, even after a catastrophic Note 7 quality control failure, with swift and far-reaching negative financial implications, as well as probable S8 setbacks, Samsung reportedly still sees 2017 as the breakthrough year for both (near-) bezelless and completely foldable smartphone designs. Not to mention the chaebol remains in running for the mobile industry’s largest high-end processor and OLED screen manufacturing contracts.

At a first glance, it looks like Samsung might be biting off more than it can chew, which is why another rumored Galaxy X delay wouldn’t exactly take us by surprise right about now. The long-in-development flexible phone/tablet hybrid however moves one step closer to materialization today for a change, as analysts expect as many as 10 million such groundbreaking devices to enter production every month from Q3 or Q4 2017.

A limited commercial launch could therefore go down in select Samsung-devoted markets during next year’s latter half, alongside the smaller-scale 1 million per month release effort of arch-rival LG in the same novel niche.

What’s truly intriguing and practically unheard of thus far is Apple and Google’s speculated 2018 involvement in the foldable smartphone market, though we’re extremely light on details when it comes to those two.

That’s not what we can say about the Samsung Galaxy X, aka Project Valley, which may have just shown us its true colors and innovative flexibility. Get a load of this snazzy, bendy, fairly tall slab of silicon patented over in Korea, possibly sporting a 7-inch OLED display you can fold in half to easily carry around and handle the hardest drops. Fingers crossed the scintillating prototype indeed comes to pass next year.

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Samsung exec ‘thinks’ a bendable phone is ‘around the corner’ – 2016 launch still possible?

The convoluted matter of when Samsung intends to bring the first fully flexible smartphone to market appeared settled a few days ago, with an extremely reputable source claiming not one, but two such bendy devices would debut early next year.While Samsung has been working on foldable screen technology for roughly a decade, it’s still not sure it’ll be able to precede rivals LG,

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Samsung exec ‘thinks’ a bendable phone is ‘around the corner’ – 2016 launch still possible?

The convoluted matter of when Samsung intends to bring the first fully flexible smartphone to market appeared settled a few days ago, with an extremely reputable source claiming not one, but two such bendy devices would debut early next year.While Samsung has been working on foldable screen technology for roughly a decade, it’s still not sure it’ll be able to precede rivals LG,

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Lenovo demoes advanced-looking bendable gadget prototypes at Tech World

With all eyes on both Lenovo’s own-brand and Motorola-labeled next big things, we were this close to ignoring the next big thing after modular smartphones and augmented reality, which the Chinese tech giant also offered a glimpse at during its jam-packed San Francisco keynote ...

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Lenovo demoes advanced-looking bendable gadget prototypes at Tech World

With all eyes on both Lenovo’s own-brand and Motorola-labeled next big things, we were this close to ignoring the next big thing after modular smartphones and augmented reality, which the Chinese tech giant also offered a glimpse at during its jam-packed San Francisco keynote ...

Continue reading »

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Samsung offers a taste of the future with demo of foldable 5.7-inch display prototype

While Samsung’s age-old flexible Youm smartphone display concept yielded several quirky consumer products in the Galaxy Round, Note Edge, then increasingly popular S6 Edge, S6 ...

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Meet Queen University’s HoloFlex, a flexible smartphone that produces holograms

The Human Media Lab at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, isn’t a stranger to mobile innovations — it made the ReFlex flexible smartphone concept after all. But in light of holograms (heh) becoming more and more popular in consumer technology, students at the school have decided to take it up to the next step with a

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LG G Flex review: the smartphone of the future

“There’s nothing flat about you.” Depending on your gender, self-image, and the cultural values where you live, that quote (from Dr. Ramchan Woo, LG’s Head of Mobile Product Planning) could be taken any number of ways. But applied to the whole of humanity in the most general sense possible, it’s true: we’re a race of rather rounded organisms. Yet the smartphones we carry with us to communicate with our curvy compatriots are almost invariably flat: boxy, right-angled handhelds that often pay little more than passing attention to ergonomics. That’s ...

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The Galaxy Round’s curved display may not be so bad after all

Rumors of curved and flexible displays have flooded the Internet for well over a year now. Samsung announced its flexible YOUM OLED displays at CES 2013. Concepts and word of such flexible smartphones reach back even further, like the Galaxy Skin concept from late 2011. It has long been understood that flexible displays would not initially bring flexible smartphones. Battery technology breakthroughs have introduced flexible cells. In smartphones, most other components, ...

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LG Exec Reveals Plans for Flexible-Screened Smartphone This Year

Of all the technologies we’re expecting to one day come to smartphones, there may be none that raises more questions than flexible screens. Could we see full-on bendable phones? Is this just going to help make regular smartphone designs less prone to accidental screen damage? Time will eventually tell, but when will these things actually get here in the first place? Over the years, we’ve seen plenty of companies

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Here’s What Flexible Screens, Batteries Mean for Future Smartphones

Manufacturers have been teasing us with flexible displays for years. You’ll be hard pressed to find a trade show anywhere in the world that doesn’t have some booth with a thin sheet of plastic being twisted and flattened over and over. The Future, they say, will be made up of these  displays, built-in to everything from bracelets to automotive displays. What they’re not telling you is that although the display may be flexible, and the futuristic mock-ups are intended to be twisted and rolled, that’s not the real intent — nor is it their real advantage. Yes, ...

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