14 DAY TRIAL // Even as Samsung Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge shipments are starting to head out to customers, we are already seeing reports claiming that the Korean tech giant has started development of next year’s Galaxy S7 flagship.
The phone maker has already ordered 8 million flexible displays per month to aid its R&D purposes related to the upcoming handset.
Not so long ago, sources familiar with the matter claimed that Samsung would be ready to release a foldable smartphone in 2016, so naturally, we assumed that the company would put the technology into its upcoming flagship.
It is becoming increasingly obvious that Samsung has been putting a lot of time and effort into researching flexible OLED technology for quite some time now.
The folks over at GSM Dome have managed to dig up a patent (as spotted at Patently Apple) published by the US Patent and Trademark Office that details a device along these lines.
Could the Samsung Galaxy S7 be a flexible phone that turns into a wearable?
It appears that in the future, the line between wearables and smartphones will blur to such an extent that the products’ functionalities will merge into a single device.
The documents talk about a smartphone/bracelet hybrid of sorts, basically a flexible OLED screen attached to a sequence of segments designed to be rotatable.
The idea is that Samsung might be prepping a phone that can flex around your wrist, creating a wearable bracelet you can carry around wherever you go. You don’t want to take your purse with you on a crazy night out? No problem, you won’t have to keep your phone in your hand, as the curved OLED display can easily be turned into an accessory.
Although given the size of today’s phones, we can only imagine the bulkiness of such a bracelet on the wrist. Samsung would not only have to considerably shrink the size of the phone’s display but it would also need to make it extremely thin.
With the advent of smartwatches, we’ve been hearing users making jokes about them, saying they would rather glue their smartphones to their wrist than spend money on an intelligent timepiece. Well, it seems like Samsung plans to make this scenario a reality at some point.