Samsung introduced a smartphone with a bending screen

A few hours ago, Samsung showed smartphones with foldable displays at its Developer Conference in San Francisco. Samsung has been working on this technology in cooperation with Google for the past few years. It was not exactly what was expected. The smartphone is not just bending, it also has a second additional screen on the side, which turns on when the main screen is closed, like a book (why?). The device was presented to the developers by the president of Samsung mobile direction Dong Jin Ko. It is not yet ready for mass production, and the company expects that within the next few months it will be possible to create and adapt enough applications for its unique form factor to make it worth it.

The new bending Samsung smartphone will work in two modes. When it is closed, it looks almost normal, like a regular gadget, only longer and thicker. Before you - a 4.6-inch screen with a resolution of 1960x840, slightly elongated (aspect ratio - 21: 9). It will not be very convenient to play or read this, but to take a call, play music, watch a short clip or write a message in a quick way - please.

But the main thing - a smartphone can be revealed. Like a book or wallet. And inside it turns out to be a large, almost tablet screen by 7.3 inches. The resolution is 2152x1536, AMOLED, 420 ppi. Without any sign that a second ago he was bent. Samsung calls it Infinity Flex Display. Dong Jin Koh said that it took many years to develop it, and it turned out to be "extremely difficult technically."

Justin Denison, Samsung's vice president of marketing, stepped onto the stage. He says this gadget "will become the basis for the smartphones of the future." In the production of the screen uses special composite polymers, flexible and rigid. And so that the display could roll up, Samsung had to make the panel under it thinner than on any other mobile device. This was achieved by reducing the thickness of the polarizer of the display. Here it is 45% thinner than other smartphones. The device is designed for several hundreds of thousands of folding / unfolding cycles without any loss in the quality of the screen display. On the stage, Denison (rather indiscreetly) stated that:

Infinity Flex is the biggest advance in mobile display technology over the past 10 years.

Why use such a device instead of a more traditional (and much less expensive) smartphone? Samsung says the benefits are two. First, of course, the screen size. The device in size will be like a normal smartphone, only thicker and narrower, and you get a tablet diagonal when, say, you sit in a vehicle or deploy a smartphone at home. Two devices for the price of one.

Secondly, the Korean company assumes that the new “bending phone” will specialize in multitasking. On the screen, you can run three applications at the same time, and work with them all, without the need to constantly close and minimize them. This technology Samsung called Multiactive Window.

The new bending smartphone has no officially confirmed name yet. There are rumors in the industry that this will be Galaxy F (from “foldable”).

Applications in the device can be run on the "side" screen. And when you deploy the smartphone, they are automatically transferred to the main display. All of these features will be supported by Android, as Google has already stated. She has been working on this technology with Samsung for the last few years, and they have devoted quite a lot of time to her (also yesterday) Android Developers Summit.

Samsung is not the only company now actively developing bending devices. Lenovo is simultaneously engaged in a smartphone, tablet, and smartwatches (there were already quite a few leaks, they promised to present gadgets in October, but things are still there). LG previously unveiled a 65-inch bendable OLED TV. Both Huawei and LG are rumored to be working on their bending smartphones scheduled for 2019. It looks like a new big trend in the industry.

And the first released working smartphone with a folding screen was the Royole FlexPai, which was shown to journalists in San Francisco this week. The hybrid device with a 7.8-inch screen freely turns from a tablet into a smartphone, and this process looks much more accurate than Samsung. The full screen resolution is 1920x1440, the device will cost about $ 1,300 (6/8 GB of RAM, 128 GB of storage, Snapdragon 8150). Royole says that their screen can survive 200 thousand flexor-extension.

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