We know all about Samsung and LG working to make bendable and foldable displays for mobile devices, but there’s competition out there with display maker EverDisplay Optronics (EDO) showing off their display here at CES Asia.
The display is a proof of concept at the moment, with plans to have the display, or at least a display using their technology used in devices around 2019. The AMOLED display can bend in quite an extreme fashion, but it’s as a curved screen similar to that seen on the Samsung Galaxy S8 and S7 Edge phones that EDO sees the displays being utilised first.
That curve can also go in other directions, if the desired form factor is required making for an interesting use case in say a kids story book:
While curved screens are good in the short term, the end game is bendable, or flexible devices. There is of course a range of things to be worked out before your phone can bend and flex as much as the screen can though. Components such as flexible motherboards, frames, batteries etc. but they think these sorts of parts could be available and in devices in the market as soon as 2020.
So, flexible is the aim, and flexible it is with an option to fold it over 90° on itself. The display specs are 5.5″ with a FullHD 1920×1080 resolution with a pixel density of 402PPI. It’s a 0.3mm thin display, but that’s just a spec for the manufacturers to worry about. So, how’s it look, well, it looks pretty good in action:
This is of course a concept really, but shows where we’re up to in terms of available technology. It’s the other components that are holding us back, but once we have those we could have the bendable, foldable phones which can stand a bit of movement without cracking that we all want.
