Samsung will launch a foldable smartphone in Q4 2017

Samsung has its fingers in a lot of pies, not only are new flagships under development but new and innovative ideas are also worked on simultaneously. The foldable smartphone is one such idea which the company is working on realizing. A new report out of Korea suggests that Samsung will be unveiling a new foldable smartphone in the fourth quarter of this year.

Samsung isn’t the only company which is eyeing a foldable smartphone concept. LG, Apple and Microsoft have patented their foldable designs but we haven’t seen any development yet from them. If Samsung is successful in producing such a design for commercial use, that will be another first in their cap. The Korean tech giant was the first one to introduce the concept of a curved display which signals to the innovative vision that the company has.

A report out earlier this week stated that Samsung will be showing a prototype of a foldable smartphone at the MWC in a private exhibition. Only a select group of investors and industry partners will be able to look at the prototype. To date we do not know much about the specs, only this aspect that the device will feature a flexible AMOLED display is known.

This is an exciting development but fraught with different technical difficulties. Even working on a concept which features a flexible display that folds is quite daunting. In addition, PI (polyimide-based plastic cover) which is an integral component of the manufacturing process is still under development. Samsung has not been able to fine tune the component and to date it is not reliable for mass scale production. So, we may look at a small batch of foldable smartphones in 2017 but the mass production will kick off in the second half of 2018.  We are excited and are curious as to how successful will Samsung be in their bid to stay ahead of their competitors with the new foldable smartphone.

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