every year there's an army of new gadgets trying to capture your attention
with well varying degrees of success but
every so often we see something with a truly undeniable cool factor and devices
with foldable screens which appear to be just around the bend
might just be the next example of this but what sort of new school science
fiction makes foldable screens possible i mean from the time we were all
watching heavy tube tvs with rabbit ear antennas to now streaming on netflix on
our iphones we've always used rigid
displays well it turns out that a simple form of
foldable display tech was actually invented all the way back in 1974 when
disco of all things was first catching on that year a xerox employee developed the
gyrocon which was actually an early form of electronic paper similar to what
you'd find in today's e-readers like the amazon kindle now because it worked by
suspending ink containing particles in fluid it didn't need a rigid frame or a
backing instead the device just applied a voltage to each particle to get it to
show either black or white depending on what text was to be displayed
of course these days flexible displays with the low resolution of an e-ink
device aren't what most people are interested in rather the foldable
display tech we're all expecting to see in our smartphones in the near future is
going to be based around oleds now you can learn more about oleds here but the
important thing to know is that their chemical makeup allows them to produce
their own light meaning that they don't need a bulky backlight behind the color
layer this has made it possible for companies like lg to build shockingly
thin tvs but how do we go from a thin
but still rigid screen to a screen that you can fold or even roll up well as it
turns out the oleds themselves are only about one ten thousandth of a millimeter
thick that is a thousand times thinner than your average sheet of paper so it's not
that hard to fathom that you could fold them like a piece of paper
so while most current phones and tvs attach oleds to a piece of glass which
is obviously thicker and less foldable than paper
foldable displays instead use a layer of
bendable plastic to support the oleds
so then that's it you swap out your glass for plastic and bob's your uncle
you got a foldable display no i'm just kidding so of course it's not that simple i mean think about it if you were
to fold a piece of paper over and over again along the same crease it will
eventually weaken and break this is paper it's designed to be folded
this is not the kind of behavior you want out of an expensive smartphone so not
just any old thin piece of plastic is going to do the trick instead samsung
appears to be using a special glass plastic hybrid layer to give its
foldable phone a little more resiliency and strength and this is really cool
it's supposed to be stronger than gorilla glass but only about 50 microns
thick making it easy to fold another challenge though has been to incorporate
electronics other than the actual oleds
now it might not be difficult to picture a flexible printed circuit board i mean
you can get roll-up keyboards for 25 bucks on ebay but manufacturing a
touchscreen that can be folded is more of a novel problem as the layer that
responds to touch on traditional smartphones and tablets is rigid meaning
that manufacturers might have to turn to more exotic nanomaterials all of this
though is really cool but kind of raises the question
what even is the point of going to all this trouble just for a foldable screen
i mean aren't our typical you know hershey bar shaped phones serving us
just fine without another gimmick well one huge potential advantage of foldable
devices is that they'll be a lot harder to break either from accidental drops or
just even leaving them in your back pocket
and the Android team is already working on developer options that should allow
apps to take full advantage of foldable screens and change layouts or add
functionality on the fly as the user folds unfolds or refolds the display so
it could result in more flexibility
pun intended but it'll probably be a while before the
software fully realizes the potential of foldable phones and you also might be in
for a weight if you want a foldable gadget that you can actually afford
although the plastics that allow them to bend may ultimately prove cheaper for
phone companies than the glass that they're using today
manufacturing challenges and the ever-present early adopter tax mean that
you will probably have to fork over a lot of cash if you really want one at
the beginning if you're short on money though don't worry guys there's plenty of
cheaper conversation pieces that you can buy
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comment we're completely out of ideas over here we have no idea what to do i mean what
was this video even about i can't even remember i i actually can't remember i
just hosted it oh right bendable screen spendable screens who thought of that
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