Bend me, shape me: Flexible phones 'out by 2013'
Samsung's new phones use OLED technology, but the firm is also looking into graphene
Imagine treating your phone like a piece of paper.
Roll it up. Drop it. Squish it in your backpack. Step on it - without any damage.
Researchers are working on just such handsets - razor-thin, paper-like and bendable.
There have already been prototypes, attracting crowds at gadget shows.
WATCH: Inside a Graphene lab developing flexible display technology
But rumours abound that next year will see the launch of the
first bendy phone. Numerous companies are working on the technology -
LG, Philips, Sharp, Sony and Nokia among them - although reports suggest
that South Korean phone manufacturer Samsung will be the first to
deliver.
Morph is one of the bendable prototypes Nokia has been working on
Samsung favours smartphones with so-called flexible OLED
(Organic Light Emitting Diode) technology, and is confident that they
will be "very popular among consumers worldwide".
Their screens will be "foldable, rollable, wearable and more,
[and] will allow for a high degree of durability through their use of a
plastic substrate that is thinner, lighter and more flexible than…
conventional LCD technology," says a Samsung spokesperson.
Paperless world
There are other technologies that could make your smartphone
bendy. After all, the concept - creating flexible electronics and
assembling them on equally flexible plastic - has been touted since the
1960s, when the first flexible solar cell arrays appeared.
In 2005, Philips demonstrated the first prototype of a rollable display.
And it may not have been obvious, but a couple of years later, flexible technology hit the mainstream.
Amazon's first Kindle e-reader used a plastic non-rigid
screen - known as an optical frontplane - to display its images. The
only problem was that the components beneath it required the device to
be stiff.
Continue reading the main story
Different display technologies
- LCD (Liquid Crystal Display): consumes a lot of energy, as every pixel on the screen is illuminated by a backlight.
- OLED (Organic Light Emitting Diode): each diode is its own light source, switched on when it receives an electric signal. Devices can be slimmer than LCD, better at reproducing colour, use less power, and flexible.
- E-ink: reflects ambient light from the surface of the display back to your eyes. It has longer battery life than other displays, but is usually black and white. It could be made in colour by placing a filter with red, green and blue tints on top of the original black-and-white display, but the colour is less bright than on OLED and LCD screens.
Like many of the e-book readers that followed, it used e-ink - an innovation developed by a US company of the same name.
The screens are black and white, and work by reflecting
natural light instead of glowing themselves, mimicking the way text
looks in paper books.
"There are about 30 million flexible e-ink displays in the
field today - the oldest working ones are from 2006," says Sri Peruvemba
of E-Ink.
"They [are] well-suited for simple phones, memory and battery indicators, smart credit cards, wristwatches, and signs."
But why are most e-ink displays hidden behind a rigid glass screen and not made bendy?
One reason is cost, says Abhigyan Sengupta, an analyst with
consultancy firm MarketsAndMarkets, which recently published a global
study on flexible displays.
To have a fully flexible finished product, both parts of the
display have to be flexible - the optical frontplane and the backplane,
where transistors are - as well as the device's battery, the outer
shell, the touchscreen and other components.
Plastic Logic designs displays using E-Ink's technology and its own
Although Mr Peruvemba says his firm has started manufacturing
displays with flexible backplanes in-house, its many partners are also
busy researching ways to make electronic paper as flexible as the real
thing.
Among them is South Korean firm LG Displays, which has just begun mass-producing fully flexible e-ink screens.
"They could prove a terrific benefit for handsets, where
damage from drops is common," says an LG spokeswoman. "Their light
weight and thinness should provide huge potential to the future of
handset design development."
Another company working with E-Ink is UK firm Plastic Logic.
It uses the US firm's optical frontplane but adds on its own
backplane made out of non-rigid plastics, and then sells the part to
device-makers.
Last May, Plastic Logic demonstrated a paper-like flexible
screen capable of playing video in colour, which is achieved by placing a
filter on top of the original black-and-white display.
This prototype was developed by Japanese company NEC
But the colours are not as bright as on other types of screens,
and the company's research manager Michael Banach acknowledges the
technology at the moment is most likely to be used as a back-up screen
which kicks in when batteries run low, rather than the main display.
'Wonder material'
So other researchers are taking a different approach.
Clad in blue lab overalls, Prof Andrea Ferrari from Cambridge University works on future bendy displays using graphene.
South Korean firm LG Displays has recently started mass-producing e-ink flexible displays
The material was first produced in 2004 by Andre Geim and
Konstantin Novoselov, two Russian-born scientists at the University of
Manchester.
Graphene is a sheet of carbon just one atom thick - yet it is
stronger than diamond, transparent, lightweight, has great conducting
properties - and is flexible.
Researchers believe that graphene may in future replace silicon and revolutionise electronics as we know it.
"We are working on flexible, bendable and transparent
displays and surfaces that could in future be part of flexible phones,
tablets, TVs and solar cells," says Prof Ferrari, who is working with
Finnish phonemaker Nokia.
"Samsung is really quite advanced in this field, but we here
in Cambridge have done some great work on Nokia's prototypes as well."
He says that graphene will complement and highly enhance the
performance of OLED-type flexible phones, because in theory, even a
handset's flexible battery can be made out of this material.
Whatever the technology, it seems certain that very soon our phones will be not just smart, but bendy too.
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