Samsung has been working on bendable screens for smartphones over the past few years, but the company is now promising that display technology will be ready to arrive in real products starting next year.
At Samsung’s Investor Forum in New York, the company revealed these displays will be so bendable that they can actually fold in half, according to ZDNet.
Specifically, Samsung says it will be making between 30,000 and 40,000 flexible displays per month by the end of 2015. The first device to use this bendable technology will launch by the end of next year, but Samsung says that “nothing has been decided on the finished product.”
There’s an important difference between flexible and bendable.
Based on the way Samsung is describing its newer technology, however, it sounds like you’ll be able to actually fold and bend future phones. Of course, developing a bendable screen is only half the battle — manufacturers still need to find a way to make processors, batteries, and all the other components inside smartphones flexible too. LG and Samsung have both already started working on batteries that can bend and fold.
So why would you want a bendable smartphone? It’s unclear if this will actually prove to be useful or just gimmicky, but in theory the ability to fold it could make it more compact and durable.
