Samsung presents its folding phone – NRC

It happens: the smartphone with foldable screen. The electronics maker Samsung has introduced a device with an Infinity Flex screen during a presentation in San Francisco on Wednesday night. It's an OLED display that you can open as a book and that is the size of a 7.3-inch tablet. If you close the device again, you can put it in your pocket. Maatje's brick is still there.

Experiments with flexible displays have been going on for years, but there was no definitive project yet. Making a device with two screens is not an art, a flexible screen that you can bend yourself as a user is a little technical wonder. Samsung was still at the last moment the winner of the Chinese manufacturer Royole. This company showed last week a smartphone with a screen that you can double. This construction seems less logical than the "book" form of Samsung.

The collapsible phone of the Chinese Royole. Royole

Three apps at the same time

According to Samsung, you can open three apps simultaneously on this phone / tablet. The added value is not yet clear.
What the manufacturer is shooting at him. The smartphone market is becoming saturated and, to continue to generate profits, manufacturers are looking for more expensive options. Prices for high-end models rise to more than a thousand euros, but real material innovations have continued in recent years.
Users often choose devices with a large screen. Much larger than 6 inch should not be understood for a normal human hand. A folding screen can offer a solution. Or, as Samsung describes it: "Multitasking, displaying content, browsing, connecting, while enlarging the screen from small to large format".

Foldable devices are not completely new. At the turn of the century, for example, the Motorola Razr and the Nokia Communicator were popular. When the touch screen appeared, with the iPhone as a reminder, the folding phone disappeared from the store. Ultra-fine OLED technology offers new options, but there is no guarantee of success: curved TV screens, called "curved" by Samsung, and curved phones (like the LG Flex) have not been successful commercial. Nevertheless, the flexible screen is lifted; Huawei and Lenovo also work on flexible display phones. And Samsung's Galaxy devices have been posting "around the corner" for a while. The foldable device that Samsung showed in the illuminated presentation is a little angular, a sign that the technology is still in its infancy. This is not yet the final design, reports the maker

Vulnerable

OLED displays do not have backlighting (back lighting) and can be produced very thin. The disadvantage is that screens are very vulnerable: there is no glass offering protection comparable to that of a conventional smartphone, but manufacturers opt for a plastic able to move. How is such an articulated screen preserved after being opened and closed thousands of times is always the question.

At the Samsung presentation, Google announced that the operating system will expand Android to support flexible displays. When the first copies will be in the store and what they will cost, it is not yet clear. Samsung says that production can start in a few months.

Google has already prepared an Android version capable of handling flexible screens. Samsung