Flexible displays – Press cycle

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Flexible screens back for another press cycle.

• With the success of the Samsung Galaxy Edge, it looks like Samsung is thinking of having another go at bringing flexible displays to the market in a meaningful way.
• This is the third or fourth time in 6 years that Samsung has considered launching these products.
• The technology for flexible screens is not the problem as fully bendable displays that can withstand a beating with a hammer have been around for more than 6 years.
• The main issues are manufacturing yield which determines the price of the display and end user demand.
  • Yield. The economics of LCD and OLED panels depends on very high volumes with only a tiny percentage of devices being defective and having to be thrown away.
  • The encapsulation of flexible displays has long been a sticking point in the manufacture of these products causing far too many panels to be defective.
  • This has had the effect of making the panels prohibitively expensive which would make the phone or tablet so pricey that no one would buy it.
  • Demand. The problem with flexible displays is that beyond one obvious use case which has its own problems (see below), no one really knows what to do with them.
  • The Samsung Galaxy Edge is a case in point as the curved part of the screen has no real function other than for offering alerts.
  • Consequently, it is a nice looking, cool to have but otherwise pointless gimmick.
  • In the mobile phone market, pointless gimmicks have time and again been shown to sell devices in huge volumes at the high end and the Galaxy Edge has been no exception.
  • Unfortunately this will make bringing flexible screens to the main stream very difficult and Samsung has had great difficulty in finding buyers for these screens in the past.
• I have long believed that the one use case that makes sense for a flexible screen is the ability to have a tablet that folds or rolls up into a phone form factor when not in use.
• This is because these days a tablet is little more than a phone with a large screen as all the other components and the software is almost exactly the same.
• This comes with its own caveats which is that the screen when unfolded into the tablet form factor, it needs to be rigid to make it useable.
• That is likely to prove to be easier said than done and I suspect that this use case is unlikely to make an appearance for quite some time.
• The net result is that with no real use case in sight for these devices, I suspect that Samsung may decide to hold off launching them in earnest until it can figure out what users can do with them.
• Hence, I suspect this theme, like every time in the past, will have a quick press cycle and then disappear into obscurity until someone really works out what to do with these screens.
• I still see upside in Samsung and Microsoft and prefer both to Google. Apple is still looking very attractive for the long-term.