CES 2019 – Optimistic origami pt. II

If you fold it, will they come?

• With most major announcements now out of the way before CES 2019, the folding screen is positioning itself to be the biggest theme at CES in January 2019, potentially kickstarting the next product cycle.
• Full-face screens are now pretty much the norm meaning that there is very little if any differentiation to be had from having a full-face OLED or LCD display.
• Hence, the Android handset makers who have no real way to differentiate through software must now seek another hardware trend with which to compete.
• The folding screen story has been around for years and was already two years late when I wrote about it in 2013 (see here), but it is finally looking like it will make it into the market in 2019.
• The two main problems with folding displays have been yield making working screens very expensive and demand as no-one really had a good idea about what to do with them.
• Times have changed somewhat as users are now demanding more and more screen real estate in tiny packages meaning that the time could be right for folding screens if they can be well executed.
• This is what Samsung teased at the launch of the Note 9 (see here), what LG has hinted at and what Chinese company Royole has now launched in conjunction with Rouyu Technology (see here).
• The smartphone-sized device can unfold into a device that is roughly the size of a small tablet.
• Unlike the ZTE Axon M, this is a single screen with a seamless fold that exhibits full touch capability in any orientation.
• However, there are obviously still problems with it as the demonstration clearly shows screen flickering when being transformed from one orientation into another.
• The other issues are going to be rigidity (panels that bend when touched are fairly useless) and protection as smartphones get dropped all the time and the standard Gorilla Glass protectors won’t work in this case.
• I suspect that this will be solved using a form of tough plastic with a rigid backplane, but this will also have a scratch problem as plastic scratches far more easily than glass.
• I think that these are solvable problems and now that both Samsung and LG have strongly hinted at devices being made available in 2019, this will be a major theme at CES in January 2019.
• There is now certainly a use case for these devices given the demand for ever-increasing screen real estate, but they have to come in small, sleek and robust packages.
• This is what the Koreans and the Japanese companies are best at and so even though the Chinese are forcing their hand, the Korean display market leaders should end up with most of the share.
• There is no sign of an alternate form-factor to replace the smartphone slab of black glass on the horizon and so it is iterations of this that will drive the market forward for now.
• I see this as the next hardware product cycle following on from full face screens and OLED which have dominated the specification races for the last few years.
• I don’t expect an Apple product before 2020 at the earliest.