Samsung made news earlier this week with its curved OLED TV, and now it’s pushing the same idea onto mobile devices with a flexible-display prototype phone. The screen curves around along the phone's right edge, giving extra space for providing content. In its demo, Samsung showed how the phone, when its screen is covered with a jacket, could give users space to see incoming text messages and acting on them.
This is also the first time we've seen Samsung break out its Youm brand name for flexible OLEDs in public. Wrap-around displays aren't the only thing the company has in mind for the technology though. It also showed some rendered footage of a foldable phone and one with a retractable, roll-up display. We've been tantalized with the promise of flexible OLED displays for years, and it's great to see some genuinely useful applications of the tech taking shape.
Although no actual product using these displays have been announced so far, Samsung did showcase three applications of it. One of them had the design of a regular smartphone, with just the right edge being bent downwards. This bent strip displayed content in landscape mode, so that even if you have the phone in a case, you can see notifications and such from the side at a glance.
The other two designs included a device that couple be folded up in the middle and another one where the display could be rolled up and retracted.
Thanks to the flexibility of the display, we might finally start seeing some disruption in the design of smartphones, which have turned into boring slabs over the past years. The flexibility also means that these displays are a lot more shock resistant. It remains to be seen what product Samsung would choose to put it in first.
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