After unveiling the Samsung Galaxy Note 8 last month, Samsung will release a foldable smartphone as early as 2018 under the Galaxy Note brand name. A company executive spoke at a news conference held in South Korea recently. The statement was presented by Dondhin Koh, Samsung's president of mobile business. The Samsung executive also talked about the difficulties and challenges of preparing to bring a foldable phone to the market.
Dondhin Koh also reported that if the development issues are not fixed by next year, it's likely that the launch of the device will be delayed.
He also reported that Samsung has a clear roadmap for including bendable smartphones in their portfolio in near future.
Infinity Display
The curved display present in a number of Samsung flagship devices was first announced with the Galaxy S6 Edge on 10th April 2015, since then the technology has improved drastically. The Edge display uses a similar technology as to bendable displays, by using bendable Organic-Light Emitting Diode displays. The infinity display has now become a standard for Samsung flagships and has gained mass critical acclaim for pushing the industry forward in a unique direction.
Although the infinity edge display has been common for Samsung topline products for three literation’s, the Galaxy S8 was when Samsung fully moved to integrate the unique display to their devices.
The technology is still being perfected to decrease distortion and increase pixel count in areas of curvature.
Rumors
Samsung first announced the Flexible Displays with prototypes on CES 2012. The display technology was named Youm at the time. Since then, there have been several rumors of Samsung possibly releasing devices using such technology.
This turned out to be partially true with the release the release of the Galaxy S6 Edge.
Last year Samsung also patented a foldable device design which led to a stream of rumors with people claiming Samsung would release a foldable device in 2017. Samsung is not the only company that is investing a lot in flexible displays. Companies such as Lenovo are also looking deeply into the technology and have even shown prototypes of the display.
This is the first time Samsung has publicly acknowledged that they have been working on smartphones with foldable displays. What Samsung will bring to the market next year is not yet known. They are are still perfecting their edge displays on their flagship Galaxy "S" and "Note" line of smartphones.
