Flexible displays – University challenge

Reply to this post

Flexible displays are hard to make and mostly useless.

• The latest innovation around flexible screens has been announced by the Queen’s University Human Media Lab in Canada which uses the flexing of the screen as a method of command input.
• A flexible LG OLED display has been combined with sensors and can detect to what the degree the screen is being flexed.
• The headline example is using the flexing of the screen to flick through the pages of an ebook which is very similar to what a user would do with a paperback.
• The paperback has the obvious advantage being readable in bright sunlight and infinite battery life.
• The researchers also demonstrate using the device as a regular touch screen smartphone.
• This is all well and good but I suspect that we are still very far from seeing flexible panels hitting the mainstream.
• Samsung and LG have had fully flexible, virtually indestructible panels for years but to date, only the most basic curved and flexible panels have made it to the market.
• There are two main reasons for this.
  • First. These devices are quite difficult to make meaning that a meaningful number of the panels fail quality tests and have to be thrown away.
  • This makes mass production prohibitively expensive and the premium that the maker would have to charge for the panel is so high that the user won’t pay for it.
  • RFM research indicates that Samsung and LG are continuing to wrestle with this problem but that little progress has been made.
  • The fact that there is no demand in the market for these devices (see below) has also not enticed them to expedite solving the mass manufacturing problems.
  • Second. No one has really come up with a decent use case for a flexible screen to date.
  • This problem is so acute that I understand that even Samsung had problems in rustling up interest for its curved and flexible displays from device manufacturers.
  • I have long been of the opinion that a major use case for this technology is a display carried on a phone form factor that can be unfolded or unrolled to give a display of 10-14 inches.
  • This would obviate the need to ever have a tablet and I think could kill the market overnight.
  • Unfortunately, the technology to make screens to this specification is still not ready and while simpler versions languish, I suspect that this will remain on the shelf.
• The net result is that flexible displays are cool to see for the first time but do very little to improve the use case of the device.
• Consequently, I suspect that flexible displays will not be making any impact on the device or ecosystem economics anytime soon.