One of my favorite booths to visit every year at MWC in Barcelona is Samsung Display, where we get to see cutting-edge developments in display technology deployed in the coolest and quirkiest of concept devices. This year the company didn’t disappoint, with several concepts we’ve never seen before catching my eye, along with some we have — like the stretchable display we saw at CES in January.
Chief among them was a candybar-style concept phone that folds twice — once from the top and once from the bottom. The pincer movement reminded me of a crab claw closing in on itself, or a book fold used to laminate dough. The phone bore an uncanny resemblance to the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip, but with two folds rather than one.
It’s not the first time we’ve seen a variation on the Galaxy Z Flip but this one, which I was only able to watch fold from behind glass, poses a durability challenge for Samsung. For every extra fold you introduce into a device, it feels like it will be easier to break. In spite of this, I will say that it looked cool and unlike any phone I’ve seen before.
Why exactly you would want a phone that folds twice when you could have one that just folds once and is otherwise the same size and shape isn’t a question for Samsung Display to answer. The purpose of the concept is to show what’s possible, not what’s probable.
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That’s something to also keep in mind when considering Samsung Display’s Flexible Cabinbag, a slim metal briefcase that folds open to reveal an 18.1-inch flexible OLED screen. It feels like something a traveling salesperson from the future might carry with them to slide open in a boardroom or on a pub table to display their wares to potential buyers.
Another concept that caught my eye was a folding games console, a little like a Nintendo Switch that could close up like a book. We already know that the next Switch won’t look like this, but there’s nothing to say future iterations couldn’t. It’s important to note that Samsung Display is separate to the company you know that makes your phone, TV and home appliances. Instead it develops screen technology that can be purchased by many phone makers and other tech companies.
The idea of a folding Switch that has a smaller footprint is appealing to me — a person who has on occasion decided not to travel with my Switch due to its size. I wasn’t allowed to play with the concept due to its fragility, but I watched a Samsung Display employee handle it, and I particularly liked the little holes that had been carved out to accommodate the joysticks when the device was folded shut.
A final idea that caught my eye was a clamshell-style folding phone with a polygon-shaped screen on the front. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen an unusually shaped front-facing screen on the top of a flip phone — it reminded me of the Samsung feature flip phones of yore (meaning the early noughties). And who doesn’t love a bit of nostalgia when it comes to phone design?
It’s impossible to say whether any of these concepts will ever see the light of day, but in the meantime it’s fascinating to think about how radically different phones of the future could potentially be thanks to these bendy, flexible new developments in screen tech.
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