Tiffany's Awesome Blog: Upcoming Phone Techolongy

Flexible phones

The first step is the galaxy round and G flex from Samsung.

In 2010 and 2011 both google approved phones launched the banana-like bends in their screens.

MATERIAL BENEFITS

In the future theses screens will be attached to a flexible bodies.

Eventually theses phones will be able to fold up like a pice of paper.

They will be stronger because they will not have the glass screens.

The screen will be replaced with plastic ones.

Its has been very hard to find a plastic to resemble glass.

ENTER OLED

OLED means organic light emitting diode which means that the thin layer of material that emits the light necessary for electronic picture.

Each pixel in an OLED display light itself rather than relying on a separate back light system.

OLED panels are far simpler, slimmer and more self-contained than LCD solutions.

Also the OLED panels can stand up to being bent.

Samsung came out with an OLED display called the Youm the display could be worked into an “S” shape.

POWER STRUGGLE

OLED screen can bend but the other vital internal components cannot.

But in 2011 the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology announced that it had developed a fully flexible RAM chip.

The Ram chip enables the reading, writing, and retention of data on a flexibility chip is essential to a fully flexible phone.

For the battery to be in the flexible form they need to be solid.

The solution has been to crate a solid or semi-solid battery.

Meanwhile LG Chem recently announced that it has produced cable battery that could be bent and even tied into a knot with out getting heated.

GIVE AND TAKE

So, given the break-throughs in these key technological areas, when will we see properly flexible phones in our shops?

Industry insiders believe that it's less than two years away. "Canatu estimates (the) first fully foldable products will be in the market in 2015," claims a spokesperson for the company.

It's an estimate that appears to back-up the projections of the smartphone manufacturers themselves. According to a slide the company recently showed to investors, Samsung anticipates that its first bendable smartphone will be ready to go in 2014, while its first fully foldable smartphone will be on the market either towards the end of 2015 or the beginning of 2016.

And don't for one minute think that this is likely to be another dead end gimmick to file alongside phones with 3D displays. Dr Kinam Kim, president and CEO of Samsung Display, recently told analysts that "flexible display penetration could rapidly increase to 40% by 2018."

That's not to mention the technology's virtually guaranteed adoption by the automotive and fashion industries. Expect the cars of the near future to feature dramatically swooping digital displays that mould and form to the shape of a dashboard, and shirts that utilise paper thin and stretchable OLED displays to alter the colour and pattern of the 'fabric.'

It seems as if the future really is flexible, and it's going to be phones that lead this somewhat bendy-legged charge.