Foldable Phones Are a Chance for a Tired Industry
Samsung has announced a potentially disruptive innovation. Now it’s important not to mess it up.
Eye-catching.
Photograph: Kyodo News/Getty Images
On Wednesday, after years of rumors and speculation, Samsung finally presented a smartphone with a foldable display that it plans to start selling next year. At the risk of sounding like a wide-eyed teenager, I consider this a potentially disruptive innovation on the scale of the iPhone — if the manufacturers can handle it right.
The technology has been more or less ripe for a while: The organic light-emitting compounds and the circuitry that delivers electric charges to them can be printed onto film as well as fused into inflexible glass. But the challenges of producing a device with a flexible display have been formidable.