Consumer CES 2020 is underway right now. Samsung has already held a presentation featuring the Ballie smart robot and augmented reality glasses. Now it's time to talk about another product, his company, according to colleagues from phonearena, plans to show behind closed doors.
Is the Samsung slider close?
Who said foldable smartphones were the ultimate dream? Not at all. Samsung continues to experiment. And it's unlikely that now manufacturers will be able to settle on any one form factor, given how many different options we are offered. One of these can be a roll-up display slider. This option looks more interesting and effective for one simple reason – manufacturers do not need to spend resources on an additional external display. In addition, if you remember the old days when different form factors were popular, sliders have become a new stage in the development of push-button devices. Everyone wanted to replace the 'books' with them.
This time, as you can see, everything is repeated. First, we were offered smartphones with a direct screen, then foldable phones in the form of a book appeared, and now we are discussing a demonstration of sliders.
How could such a device look like?
Indeed, many do not yet fully understand how you can implement the mechanism of a rolling display in a slider. Here is such a roll-up display in 2016 Samsung presented at SID 2016.
This summer, the Koreans patented a device with a similar display, and this is a slider. It looks like this:
Samsung slider patent
Cool, isn't it? You can also find similar renders on the web:
Roll-up smartphone render
But they look bad, to be honest. Such a solution is ineffective, and will entail unpleasant situations associated with a phone breakdown. The vertical slider seems to be a much more interesting and familiar solution. Are you of the same opinion? Share it on Telegram.
How reliable is this design?
This is where we come across a topic that requires discussion. In the case of folding devices, only a certain part of the screen is affected. Here, according to the design, each time the screen is pulled out, it will be exposed to a much wider area.
How many cycles such a screen will withstand is still a mystery. In addition, the difficulty lies in the fact that the folding angle is very large. Galaxy Fold solved this problem by creating a rounded shape at the fold, but the situation there is easier due to the absence of any folding mechanisms.
It is also interesting how the software will work in this case. After all, the slider will probably not open very quickly. In this case, the area of the screen that was previously hidden may remain black at the moment of disclosure, which will not look very presentable.
Samsung – one hope for you
Who on the market is capable of such experiments? Samsung only. Huawei can be debited simply because now they cannot sell their devices to the whole world due to the lack of Google services. Strange things have been happening with LG too. Only the Koreans remain. Apple is a major innovator, but the company simply has nothing to offer. Apple is more about software than about hardware. The company does not have its own display factories and interesting hardware technologies to conduct such experiments.
It is Samsung, in my opinion, is the most innovative company today.
Of course there is BOE, which makes flexible displays for Huawei and others. For example, the Moto Razr has a display from BOE. However, this approach will always slow down the development process because display manufacturers do not have close contact with smartphone designers.
In the case of Samsung, the process is accelerated precisely due to the fact that everything is produced within one company, which probably has established interaction of different teams with each other.
Of all the companies on the market, only Samsung can fully support itself with all the components. The only worthy competitor was the company Huawei, but it was successfully 'drowned' by sanctions.
What do you think? Will the Koreans surprise us with an interesting roll-up slider in the future? Share your opinion in the comments.