There are a lot of benefits that compensates to a folding PC in the early days too though. It was portable, which means you can set up anywhere and work from anywhere without needing an entire luggage load. The added portability also means you are a lot more flexible with work and locations that allows you to quickly get anything, and everything done from anywhere in the world. Of course, in the early days, you are compromised in battery life, but getting just a few hours window to send out a quick email or quick look at stuff you get from work is more than enough.
Fast forward to 2021 and battery life on portable devices has advanced tremendously. Processing chips are a lot more powerful today and a lot more energy efficient. We are at an age where mobile processing power can match desktop tower processing power. We are at an age where a laptop makes more sense than a tower PC and the tower desktop has been reserved to a niche group.
We have gotten a little side-tracked there, apologies. We are supposed to be talking about foldable smartphones, instead we rambled on about desktop tower PCs and notebook PCs. But it is important to understand why foldable smartphones are going to be the next big thing.
While at this point, the advantages of a candy bar type smartphone still outweigh a foldable smartphone in terms of build durability, optimisation, build quality, and even battery life, there are some arguments for a foldable device. A foldable smartphone can be a lot more versatile in different cases, or they can be a lot less intrusive and more subtle in another.
Take a Samsung Galaxy Z Fold3 for example. It is a regular candy bar smartphone in a lot of cases. When you need a little bit more display real estate for a better overview of your email, multiwindow spaces, and even just for pure entertainment, you simply unfold it to make it a sort of tablet. The Samsung Galaxy Z Flip3 is a little pager like device when you do not need it to be always a nuisance in your face, and its smaller to store in your pockets or bags. When you need the larger display for whatever purpose, it becomes a regular candy bar device. Even Google is on board to produce develop their own foldable device in collaboration with Samsung.
Of course, the foldable smartphone is still very early in technology and one of the biggest problems with it is its durability. In the three iterations of the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold device, that is always its point of contention. In fact, in its first attempt at a folding smartphone, Samsung had to delay the product shipment by a few months just to ensure that they have a better solution to protect their folding display. Samsung is still continuously developing the folding screen technology though.
Oddly enough, competition to Samsung’s folding screen mechanism and build material is not coming from a competing smartphone manufacturer. Well, when we say oddly, we kind of also expected it. The competition to the folding smartphone phenomenon comes from LG and what they call their ‘Real Folding Window’ glass technology.
Before you get confused, LG did make smartphone devices. They pulled out of the smartphone market recently enough that they are now not really a threat or competition to Samsung in the grander mobile device market. They are still one of the largest players in display manufacturing though, which is incidentally also Samsung’s forte. The announcement of their new foldable display technology should come as no surprise.
The ‘Real Folding Window’ glass as they call it is not really glass at all. It really is just a coated piece of plastic, to be fair. While it does sound pretty low tech to begin with, it is still complex to implement. They claim that this material allows the piece of ‘glass’ material to be bent on both sides of the device without sacrificing rigidity and durability while remaining free of creases. While it is not technically glass, LG Chem says that the material is as hard as tempered glass and could be even thinner. The prototype material they were able to produce is just a few micrometers thick and is rated to fold more than 200,000 times before any noticeable deterioration.
How LG achieved this feat with this prototype display cover material is by using a sheet of thin plastic film that is coated with more plastic film, specifically PET films. If you think that PET sounds familiar, you will be right. It is the material that you can find on modern disposable plastic bottles. It is a clever solution to a complex problem. It is also a more cost friendly option to developing new materials to begin with, which might mean that we will see more competitively priced foldable devices in the future.
You have to keep in mind that the material itself is just a cover though, and it has not addressed the fundamental problem in folding displays; the display itself. LG also says that the new material is not set to be commercialised just yet until 2023 at the earliest. LG is not unique in using PET in their material design though. Samsung’s latest Galaxy Z Fold3 and Z Flip3 has a PET coating on their glass manufactured by a German partner that should prove to be more durable and feels better on the devices.
Samsung is not just sitting by and passing their work on the foldable displays on the Galaxy Z Fold3 and Z Flip3 as the perfect foldable display technology though. We mentioned that they are reportedly working with Google to manufacture Google’s first foldable smartphones. Other manufacturers are also relying on Samsung to ramp up production of their foldable displays. They are also betting that Samsung could come up with a viable glass solution for foldable displays as Samsung has been reportedly working with Corning for their next version of a foldable display.
LG’s participation in the battle for foldable display supremacy is huge though. It ramps competition up, which should ramp innovation and competitiveness of each brand up. It will also eventually lead to a price war, which also means lower prices for the new technology. Lower prices is always good for us consumers who are always hungry for more innovation.