flexible display

You won't have to bend over backward to see Samsung's latest effort in flexible smartphone screens.

Samsung Display, a spinoff from Samsung Electronics, will show off a pair of bendable screens at CES that could one day appear in a radically new smartphone or TV design, according to company representatives.

Attendees will get to see a 5.5-inch flexible screen intended for smartphone use, with a 1,280x720-pixel HD resolution and a 267 pixel density. In addition, the team will also show off a television-size 55-inch screen.

A flexible display offers design freedom, Samsung Display told CNET, noting … Read more

Samsung is pushing ahead with flexible mobile devices, a new report claims.

Samsung is currently putting the final touches on flexible displays made of plastic rather than glass, The Wall Street Journal is reporting today, citing an unidentified source with knowledge of the company's plans. Once Samsung's development phase is complete, the company plans to start mass producing the displays for release in the first half of 2013, according to the Journal.

Samsung Display last year posted a video showing a concept device that comes with a flexible screen. The video showed the AMOLED display being bent and … Read more

With bendable smartphones already on tap for next year, Samsung's next big thing may be a flexible, transparent tablet.

Samsung's Mobile Display division posted a video yesterday showing off a concept device that looks to be a smartphone-tablet hybrid that can be rolled up like a newspaper or expanded for different tasks.

In the clip below, you can see the Samsung Flexible AMOLED concept being used as an e-reader, a camera, a video chat system, and an interpreter. The company also imagines the tablet showing off 3D images through the use of an augmented-reality system. … Read more

SUNNYVALE, Calif.--With the Nokia Research Center leading the way, the Finnish handset manufacturer could be headed down one twisted road--and we mean that in a good way.

Since its founding in 1986, the NRC has been charged with developing mobile technology through the exploration of science. The center recently celebrated its 25th anniversary, and to commemorate the milestone, Nokia hosted various events around the world. CNET got to take part in the U.S. celebrations at Nokia's Sunnyvale, Calif., headquarters yesterday, where we got to check out some of the latest innovations from the NRC. … Read more

Not to be outdone by Nokia, Samsung says it will introduce smartphones with flexible displays next year.

On its earnings conference call with investors this morning, the Korean company briefly mentioned its plans to bring the bendy phones to market in the coming months.

"The flexible display, we are looking to introduce sometime in 2012, hopefully the earlier part than later," said spokesman Robert Yi. "The application probably will start from the handset side and then migrate over to tablets and other mobile devices."

There were no further details on which product line might be among the first to get a bendy screen.… Read more

The secret to building an inexpensive flexible computer display is not in the core components of the displays themselves. It's in the material those components are mounted on.

The fundamental elements of e-ink and OLED displays are small enough that they won't break if laid down on flexible backing. The problem, according to Janglin Chen of Taiwanese government-funded research lab ITRI, is the backing itself. The substrate the components are mounted onto has to have certain physical properties, especially during the manufacturing process. To date, the primary material on which displays have been layered has been glass, which … Read more

The next time you play Halo or Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, you could be flexing your gameplay skills on a thin, bendable projection screen.

Code-named Cobra (PDF), that future has yet to come. But the guys at Queen's University in Ontario, Canada, are working at it. Human Media Lab's Zi Ye and Hammad Khalid have developed a system that combines a wearable computer and shoulder-mounted pico projector with a flexible display fitted with flex-sensing wires and sensors.

To play, the system projects the game onto the screen, which users can flex, tap, or shake to activate … Read more

A patent filed by Nokia with the US Patent and Trademark Office describes a bendable device with a flexible screen. It's not simply that, of course, as we know phones with flexible panels aren't new. Remember the ill-fated Readius from Polymer Vision?

According to parts of the patent, the differentiating factor is that such a device will respond according to the shape a user puts it in. For example, bending it to resemble a can will cause it to do a search for a bar or pub in the neighborhood, while making it into the shape of a … Read more

While we're still waiting for OLED TVs to get more realistic prices, a Japanese company is moving on to making OLED-based posters for advertising.

The prototype, pictured above as a poster for Japan's Rakuten Eagles professional baseball team, uses both organic light-emitting diodes (OLED) and inorganic light-emitting diodes (regular LEDs) to create an image that looks like it's animated, according to Tech-On. The poster measures approximately 29 inches by 20 inches, and was created by Dai Nippon.

The LEDs are used for white backlighting behind a printed color image, and the OLEDs to create the text. Light … Read more