According to media reports, Huawei is ambitious and willing to do whatever it takes to beat Samsung, the world’s largest handset maker, even though it is still in the laboratory stage, and possibly launch before Samsung.
Prior to this, Samsung executives said publicly at the Note9 launch that Samsung was working on a foldable phone, suggesting that it “won’t keep everyone waiting too long” because Samsung didn’t want to lose the title of the world’s first foldable phone to anyone else. Samsung is said to be in the final stage of development and product delivery.
Yu Chengdong, CEO of Huawei, said in a recent interview with German media, “Why are you still using a computer? Maybe it’s because the screen is too small, and we’re going to change that. It would be even more convenient if the screen could be folded up. The product could be on the market within a year.
Apple, on the other hand, stuck to its bangs as it unveiled its biggest iPhone yet at this year’s event. From last year’s iPhone X to all three phones released this year, Apple has adopted this slightly “silly” design. Investigate its reason, nothing more than the pursuit of the ultimate screen ratio.
Which begs the question: will foldable phones become mainstream in 2019? What can foldable screens bring to the masses?
From the initial button mobile phone to today’s large-screen mobile phone, a large number of our operations have been more focused on the screen, so the physical keyboard has gradually been replaced by the screen virtual keyboard, which is on the edge of obsoletion.
This year’s smartphones are moving toward “all screens,” and slide-out phones like the OPPO Find X have largely fulfilled that vision: a 6.42-inch screen with a whopping 93.8% of the screen. Assuming it reaches 100% next year, I don’t think it will make a substantial difference to the user experience.
What’s next?
It’s not the full screen that should change the world, it’s the foldable screen.
At this stage, it is indisputable that the screen size of mobile phones is increasing. Mobile phone manufacturers have tried to increase the size through the screen ratio, but as mentioned above, this range is limited. So before the parity ratio really reaches 100%, phone manufacturers are looking for more solutions, and folding the screen is definitely one of the directions, which can effectively solve the problem of screen size, so that the screen ratio is not so important.
Foldable screens could even combine phones, tablets and laptops into one.
- New ways to interact: Bigger screens mean lots of new ways to interact. For example, if Android phones one day anchor apps to the bottom like Windows PCS do, instead of switching between apps in the background. You can also have a game mode like a console, with the top screen displaying content, the bottom screen acting as a controller, etc.
What is a foldable screen? What’s the difficulty?
As the name suggests, the best thing about a foldable screen is that it can be folded, large and portable at the same time. Foldable screen can also be considered as a kind of flexible screen, and the current exposure of flexible screen is mostly OLED material, the reason is that it can spontaneously light, remove the trouble of light source.
Difficulty 1: How does the screen bend
Although flexible screen can achieve bending, but if frequent bending, there will be the same as metal paper fatigue problem, meaning flexible screen if multiple bending plus a long time of use, and then scrapped. How to solve this problem needs to be studied by hardware manufacturers.
Difficulty two: hinge problem
While laptops also use hinge technology to connect the console to the computer screen, foldable phones use hinge technology much more often than laptops, and even phones have three or more screens. How to deal with the hinge lightweight problem is also one of the difficulties.
Difficulty three: software compatibility and human-computer interaction
When these two hardware problems are solved, software problems follow. When the screen becomes larger by folding, there is a lot of room for system interaction, not only in terms of size but also in terms of logic. The original style of mobile phone screen has become the stereotype, whether apple’S iOS or Google’s Android style is very similar, but after expanding to multiple screens, system developers need to adapt, or large mobile phone companies with UI development ability to do it. And resolution and all that…
What’s the difference between the screen material?
No matter what kind of screen, can not leave the screen itself material, we might as well first to understand the market now mainstream mobile phone screen material has what.
LCD (liquid crystal display) : LCD display requires backlight support, hesitation light through two layers of glass and substrate and a variety of optical diaphragm, matching film, color filter to produce polarized light, so the LCD screen in brightness and color will inevitably have some distortion. TFT and IPS are LCD based technologies, which can improve the shortcomings of LCD.
OLED (organic light-emitting diode) : the biggest feature of OLED is that it does not need backlight support and has self-illumination; At the same time, it has the advantages of wide Angle of view, high contrast, low power consumption, high reaction rate, full color and simple process. According to the driving mode, OLED can be divided into passive OLED (PMOLED) and active OLED (AMOLED).
At present, most of our mobile phone screens use AMOLED screens, but the disadvantage is that AMOLED uses Pentile pixel arrangement, which leads to a higher sense of graininess compared with the same resolution.
It is not hard to see that LCD and AMOLED screens are 50/50 in the mobile phone industry, but in the future, foldable screens may only be made of AMOLED materials.
Most of the mobile phones of various brands used in our daily life do not have the ability to produce their own screens. The world’s mainstream mobile phone screen suppliers include Samsung, JDI (Japan Display), LG and Sharp.
In addition to Samsung, China’s BOE also produces a number of flexible AMOLED screens: the 5.5-inch WQHD flexible OLED display that can bend in an “S” shape; A 7.56 inch QHD flexible AMOLED display that can be folded in half with a radius of 5mm to combine mobile phones and tablets into one; A full screen with 92% of the screen; 18:9 curved full screen.
After 8,102 years, is a foldable phone really a long way off?
Zte launched a foldable phone, the Axon M, in early 2018.
The ZTE AXON M has two rigid screens that are then joined together by a rotating shaft. The screen expands to 6.75 inches. The portable device offers the experience of a larger screen.
Will foldable phones change the world?
Foldable screens are still in the conceptual stage, but executives at Both Samsung and Huawei said in interviews that their foldable phones are already in the works and could be available as soon as next year.
Foldable phones are welcome news for the long-dormant smartphone industry, providing a new direction for the industry, and consumers are looking forward to these new gadgets.
It’s been 11 years since the iPhone changed the world, and foldable phones are poised to do it again.
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