Fold-Up Screens Could Make Their Big Debut

Fold-Up Screens

Could Make

Their Big Debut

THE RUMORS HAVE BEEN swirling for

months. Though they couldn’t be confirmed,

their persistence suggests that something

significant may be coming from Samsung,

possibly as early as this year: a foldable

mobile. 􀂚 Today, the world of mobiles consists

of two major realms—tablets and smartphones.

Tablets are good for reading magazines and

books, typing long messages on a linked

keyboard, looking at pictures, and surfing

the Web. Smartphones are good for texting and talking. Engineers

have long dreamed of

merging the two.

Such a device would

morph from one to the

other by folding: Open, it’s

a tablet, but by bending

or folding it in half you’d

transform it into a phone.

“You can expect to open up

your phone and double the

screen real estate,” says

Roel Vertegaal, a computer

scientist at Queen’s

University in Ontario.

Besides the versatility,

you’d have interesting new

possibilities—imagine bending

your phone to flip ahead

in an e-book, just as you

would flex a novel’s covers

to jump ahead a few pages.

Samsung has pursued

flexible designs for at least

four years, going so far as

to develop “artificial muscles”

that push and pull a

smartphone’s components

into new positions to prevent

damage as it bends.

Now, according to media

reports, the company may

finally be ready to share

those technologies with

the world and save users

the hassle of carrying both

a phone and a tablet.

“Having that bimodality

in a device would, I think,

be really game changing,”

says mobile analyst

Wayne Lam at IHS Markit.

“You’re not only creating

a new form factor for

the phone, but you’re

also cannibalizing other

product categories.”

Competitors are thinking

along similar elastic

lines. At a trade show last

summer, Lenovo showed off a concept product for

a smartphone that folded

around a user’s wrist into a

wearable device. Throughout

2016, a Chinese manufacturer

named Moxi

Group promised a limited

release of its own high-end

flexible smartphone. But

Samsung would be the first

of any major company to

debut a device with a truly

flexible screen.

If Samsung does release

such a phone, it would

signal the first major

departure from the flat,

rectangular form that

has defined smartphone

designs since Apple

released the first iPhone in

2007. Manufacturers have

experimented with curved

glass and adopted larger

screens, but essentially

all smartphones today are

design descendants of that

original iPhone.

The simple, rigid smartphone

has endured partly

because the challenges

of building a foldable

screen that is rugged and

dependable are great. Stiff

components such as the

battery must be made to

either bend along with the

screen or be situated away

from the fold.

Vertegaal himself built

a flexible smartphone in

his lab last year and tested

hundreds of screens

before settling on one that

worked—a high-definition

organic light-emittingdiode

screen produced by

LG Display. OLED screens

contain a thin film of

organic compounds that

produce light from an electric

current right at the

surface of the device. They

are a favorite of designers

working on flexible TV and

mobile units because they

do not require the bulky

backlight and filters found

in LCD screens.

Samsung happens to be

the largest global supplier

of OLED panels. In 2013,

the company showed off

a concept product with a

bendable OLED screen at

the CES electronics show.

It set off a frenzy in the

tech blogosphere and led

to speculation that the

company would release a

smartphone based on it.

Vertegaal says the

biggest challenge in

building his own flexible

phone was powering

all the pixels in his LG

display with connectors

that could withstand

repeated bendings. To

keep it simple, he used a

relatively primitive screen

that had only 720 pixels.

He realized that the

rigid materials found in

conventional smartphones

are, unfortunately, quite

delicate. “Circuits are

made out of metals, and

these metals break under

stress,” he says. “While

it’s possible to make these

bendable screens, it’s

difficult to make them in a

way that they don’t break.”

One solution may be to

use printed electronics to

integrate razor-thin circuits

and flattened antennas

along the surfaces of a

smartphone. In theory,

this technique could make

phones more flexible by

reducing the number of

large components and

fragile attachments within

the device. However, the

easiest way to create such

products is with injection

molding, a process that

is seldom used in smartphone

manufacturing.

Right now, only two

companies in the world

have the expertise and

production chops to

manufacture a smartphone

with a bendable display for

the mass market: Samsung

and LG, says William

Stofega, a mobile analyst

at International Data Corp.

Just last year, at CES, LG

exhibited an OLED screen,

less than 1 millimeter

thick, that could roll up

like a newspaper. But

Stofega says the time,

complexity, and expense of

manufacturing means that

any flexible products that

debut this year will likely

be pricey, high-end devices.

Samsung needs a hit to

regain momentum after

last year’s Galaxy Note 7

fiasco, in which it coped

with reports of dozens

of the smartphones

catching fire. Ultimately,

the problems prompted

a recall that slashed

profits by 17 percent,

or US $4 billion, in that

quarter. A flashy line of

foldable phones could

help the company rebuild

its reputation. However,

it would be a high-risk

strategy, Stofega notes.

“No one wants to risk

coming out with a device

that looks pretty cool and

then, after about 2,000

bends, just cracks right in

half,” he says.

Samsung wouldn’t

comment on its plans

for 2017. So we’ll all

have to wait and see if

the company dazzles us

this year with a couple

of flexible smartphones—

or leaves the many design

headaches and teething

pains for its rivals to

endure.