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every year there's an army of new gadgets trying to capture your attention

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with well varying degrees of success but

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every so often we see something with a truly undeniable cool factor and devices

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with foldable screens which appear to be just around the bend

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might just be the next example of this but what sort of new school science

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fiction makes foldable screens possible i mean from the time we were all

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watching heavy tube tvs with rabbit ear antennas to now streaming on netflix on

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our iphones we've always used rigid

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displays well it turns out that a simple form of

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foldable display tech was actually invented all the way back in 1974 when

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disco of all things was first catching on that year a xerox employee developed the

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gyrocon which was actually an early form of electronic paper similar to what

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you'd find in today's e-readers like the amazon kindle now because it worked by

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suspending ink containing particles in fluid it didn't need a rigid frame or a

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backing instead the device just applied a voltage to each particle to get it to

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show either black or white depending on what text was to be displayed

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of course these days flexible displays with the low resolution of an e-ink

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device aren't what most people are interested in rather the foldable

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display tech we're all expecting to see in our smartphones in the near future is

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going to be based around oleds now you can learn more about oleds here but the

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important thing to know is that their chemical makeup allows them to produce

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their own light meaning that they don't need a bulky backlight behind the color

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layer this has made it possible for companies like lg to build shockingly

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thin tvs but how do we go from a thin

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but still rigid screen to a screen that you can fold or even roll up well as it

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turns out the oleds themselves are only about one ten thousandth of a millimeter

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thick that is a thousand times thinner than your average sheet of paper so it's not

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that hard to fathom that you could fold them like a piece of paper

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so while most current phones and tvs attach oleds to a piece of glass which

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is obviously thicker and less foldable than paper

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foldable displays instead use a layer of

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bendable plastic to support the oleds

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so then that's it you swap out your glass for plastic and bob's your uncle

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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

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to fold a piece of paper over and over again along the same crease it will

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eventually weaken and break this is paper it's designed to be folded

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this is not the kind of behavior you want out of an expensive smartphone so not

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just any old thin piece of plastic is going to do the trick instead samsung

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appears to be using a special glass plastic hybrid layer to give its

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foldable phone a little more resiliency and strength and this is really cool

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it's supposed to be stronger than gorilla glass but only about 50 microns

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thick making it easy to fold another challenge though has been to incorporate

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electronics other than the actual oleds

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now it might not be difficult to picture a flexible printed circuit board i mean

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you can get roll-up keyboards for 25 bucks on ebay but manufacturing a

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touchscreen that can be folded is more of a novel problem as the layer that

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responds to touch on traditional smartphones and tablets is rigid meaning

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that manufacturers might have to turn to more exotic nanomaterials all of this

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though is really cool but kind of raises the question

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what even is the point of going to all this trouble just for a foldable screen

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i mean aren't our typical you know hershey bar shaped phones serving us

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just fine without another gimmick well one huge potential advantage of foldable

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devices is that they'll be a lot harder to break either from accidental drops or

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just even leaving them in your back pocket

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and the Android team is already working on developer options that should allow

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apps to take full advantage of foldable screens and change layouts or add

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functionality on the fly as the user folds unfolds or refolds the display so

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it could result in more flexibility

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pun intended but it'll probably be a while before the

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software fully realizes the potential of foldable phones and you also might be in

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for a weight if you want a foldable gadget that you can actually afford

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although the plastics that allow them to bend may ultimately prove cheaper for

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phone companies than the glass that they're using today

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manufacturing challenges and the ever-present early adopter tax mean that

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you will probably have to fork over a lot of cash if you really want one at

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the beginning if you're short on money though don't worry guys there's plenty of

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cheaper conversation pieces that you can buy

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the archives at brilliant.org so thanks for watching guys like dislike check out

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our other videos don't forget to leave a comment if you have a suggestion for a future fast as possible please leave a

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comment we're completely out of ideas over here we have no idea what to do i mean what

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was this video even about i can't even remember i i actually can't remember i

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just hosted it oh right bendable screen spendable screens who thought of that

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so leave a comment and then subscribe so that you can see your video come to life

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on a screen that's rigid