Flexible screens: what are they and what is their advantage?

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From being flat and firm to having more curves and being flexible: will the time come when all the screens become folding? What is the difference?

Every day more progress is made in the manufacture of folding screens. The first company that risked creating it was Sony, when in 2010 it relied on military technology to design this touch screen OLED 4.1 inches and only 80 micrometers thick —human hair has a thickness of 100 micrometers—, so you were to able to roll in a pencil without damaging the screen. It also offered high-quality color images, according to the BBC.

Leer en español: Pantallas flexibles: ¿en qué consiste y cuál es la ventaja?

From then on, large companies such as Philips, Nokia, Samsung, and LG have continued to innovate in this segment, according to El País. Mainly the last two mentioned, as maximum exponents in the mass sale of televisions and smartphones with curved screens nowadays, have presented folding screens in order to go beyond a presentation and for it to be sold massively.

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What is the advantage of a flexible screen?

One can think that the invention of flexible screens is the new way that companies have to compete with each other to demonstrate which one is more innovative. However, the journal Periodismo exposes that this type of screens offers benefits such as greater resistance, due to its flexibility, because they are less prone to break if it falls. It also means better portability, since smartphones or laptops could be moved easily and without taking up as much space, also televisions could be folded in order to take advantage of the room's space. To achieve this, it must be possible to manufacture the other components in such a way that they are also flexible.

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First flexible phone

This last decade, even though Samsung and LG presented smartphone with curved screens like the Samsung Galaxy Round and the LG G Flex, the first manufacturer of a folding phone was China Royale company, with the FlexPai, launched at the end of 2018. It is a kind of "phablet" (combination of smartphone and tablet), with a 7.8-inch folding screen, FullHD resolution of 1920×1440 pixels and a Snapdragon 855 processor with 6GB or 8GB of RAM. The FlexPai can be folded completely in two — a transformation from tablet to phone—  and ensures resisting more than 200,000 foldings (equivalent to folding it 100 times every day for 5 years) for a price of USD 1320, according to La Vanguardia.

For its part, LG launched a roll-up television in January 2019: the LG Signature OLED TV 65R9. This one has a 65-inch screen that can be rolled into a kind of box-shaped chassis, which makes it possible to "store" the entire TV inside this box through an option called Zero View. This option offers two other view modes: Line View, to display part of the screen, and Full View, to take out the entire TV. In addition, LG promises that this TV has all the features of a modern TV, according to Xataka.

Regarding the remaining ones, large companies assure that they will sell flexible devices in this 2019, among them Samsung, which already presented a prototype of a smartphone that will be put on sale in the first half of this year, according to Xataka. Huawei is another company that has already prepared the presentation of its folding phone on February 24, according to UnoCero. Finally, according to the filtration of a patent, Apple is designing what would be its flexible iPhone, although in this case there is no confirmed date of a possible presentation, according to As.

LatinAmerican Post | Juan Manuel Bacallado

Translated from "Pantallas flexibles: ¿en qué consiste y cuál es la ventaja?"