Samsung’s first commercial attempt at releasing a phone with a flexible display, the Galaxy Round, didn’t exactly light the world on fire. However, Android Authoritydraws our attention to a new report from Korean publication Duam that suggests Samsung is working on something much more promising for next year. Apparently Samsung is planning to release its first-ever foldable tablet in 2015, which would be the first commercial release of a technology that Samsung has been toying around with for a while now.
Android Authority points out that based on previous Samsung patents, we should expect the device to have three separate panels that can be either folded on top of one another or folded outward to create a full tablet. Fully extended, the device will have a display with a diagonal of between 8 to 9 inches, so it looks like this is going to be a mid-sized tablet that’s somewhere between an iPad mini and a standard iPad. Of course, this device also figures to be very bulky when it folds up and it will be interesting to see just how thin Samsung can make the basic panels.
Tech companies have been promising fully foldable displays for quite some time without any commercial products to show for it, but Samsung might soon change that. The Korean tech giant is reportedly working on a new tablet with a screen that can be folded down to the size of your average smartphone. What's more, the slate is said to hit the market some time in early 2015.
According to Android Authority, the tablet will feature an 8 to 9-inch 1080p OLED display that can be folded over itself twice, significantly reducing the its footprint. The tablet would have to be relatively thin, so as not to increase its overall bulk too much when completely folded.
There isn't much additional information available about the mystery tablet, though, if it does exist, it would lend credence to multiple reports that Samsung has been working to create such devices. We previously wrote about a leaked Samsung tablet concept that featured a foldable display along it's bottom edge that doubled as a stand.Similarly, Samsung went on record in November saying it will release fully foldable smartphones by 2015, so a foldable tablet may not be that far behind.
To date, the only commercially available devices with bendable or flexible displays have been Samsung's Galaxy Round and LG's G Flex smartphones. Both handsets relied on curved designs, with the Round's screen bent along its vertical axis and the G Flex bent on its horizontal axis. Unfortunately, neither device was close to being able to fold over on itself.
So will 2015 be the year we finally see a fully flexible device? We'll have to wait until next year to see.
Posts
