Gadgetory

every year there's an army of new gadgets trying to capture your attention with well varying degrees of success but every so often we see something with a truly undeniable cool factor and devices with foldable screens which appear to be just around the bend might just be the next example of this but what sort of new-school science fiction makes foldable screens possible I mean from the time we were all watching heavy tube TVs with rabbit ear antennas to now streaming on Netflix on our iPhones we've always used rigid displays well it turns out that a simple form of foldable display tech was actually invented all the way back in 1974 when disco of all things was first catching on that year a Xerox employee developed the Jireh con which was actually an early form of electronic paper similar to what you'd find in today's ear eaters like the Amazon Kindle now because it worked by suspending ink containing particles in fluid it didn't need a rigid frame or a backing instead the device just applied a voltage to each particle to get it show either black or white depending on what text was to be displayed of course these days flexible displays with the low resolution of an e-ink device aren't what most people are interested in rather the foldable display tech we're all expecting to see in our smartphones in the near future is going to be based around Oh LEDs now you can learn more about ole Ed's here but the important thing to know is that their chemical makeup allows them to produce their own light meaning that they don't need a bulky backlight behind the color layer this has made it possible for companies like LG to build shockingly thin TVs but how do we go from a thin but still rigid screen to a screen that you can fold or even roll up well as it turns out the O LEDs themselves are only about one ten thousandth of a millimeter thick that is a thousand times thinner than your average sheet of paper so it's not that hard to fathom that you could fold them like a piece of paper so while most current phones and TVs attach o leads to a piece of glass which is obviously thicker and less foldable than paper foldable displays instead use a layer of bendable plastic to support the O LEDs so then that's it you swap out your glass for plastic and Bob's your uncle you got a foldable just I'm just kidding so of course it's not that simple I mean think about it if you were to fold a piece of paper over and over again along the same crease it will eventually weaken and break and this is paper it's designed to be folded this is not the kind of behavior you want out of an expensive smartphone so not just any old thin piece of plastic is gonna do the trick instead Samsung appears to be using a special glass plastic hybrid layer to give its foldable phone a little more resiliency and strength and this is really cool it's supposed to be stronger than Gorilla Glass but only about 50 microns thick making it easy to fold another challenge though has been to incorporate electronics other than the actual ohlet's now it might not be difficult to picture a flexible printed circuit board I mean you can get roll-up keyboards for 25 bucks on eBay but manufacturing a touchscreen that can be folded is more of a novel problem as the layer that responds to touch on traditional smartphones and tablets is rigid meaning that manufacturers might have to turn to more exotic nano materials all of this though is really cool but kind of raises the question what even is the point of going to all this trouble just for a foldable screen I mean aren't our typical you know Hershey bar shaped phones serving us just fine without another gimmick well one huge potential advantage of foldable devices is that there'll be a lot harder to break either from accidental drops or just even leaving them in your back pocket and the Android team is already working on developer options that should allow apps to take full advantage of foldable screens and change layouts or add functionality on the fly as the user folds unfolds or refold z-- the display so it could result in more flexibility pun intended but it'll probably be a while before the software fully realizes the potential of foldable phones and you also might be in for a wait if you want a foldable gadget that you can actually afford although the plastics that allow them to bend may ultimately prove cheaper for phone companies than the glass that they're using today manufacturing challenges and the ever-present early adopter tax mean that you will probably have to fork over a lot of cash if you really want one at the beginning if you're short on money though don't worry guys there's plenty of cheaper conversation pieces that you can buy here's a new year's resolution that's both fun and rewarding check out today's sponsor brilliant brilliant helps you train your brain every day by providing you with problems to solve each problem provides you with the context and the framework that you need to tackle it so you 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