14 DAY TRIAL // Flexile and foldable phones are certainly the next big thing in the smartphone market and, although some companies have the capacity to produce them, they have yet to release such devices to the mass-market.
Kolon Industries, a big player in mass-production of this technology, believes that three to five tech companies will be developing foldable phones in 2018. Such devices are said to take up 20% of the smartphones market in South Korea, according to a new report.
You might not have heard of Kolon Industries, but it holds a major role in creating foldable smartphones. The company is currently the only producer in the world of colorless polyimide, a key element for foldable devices, since the flexible film can easily replace rigid glass sheets which wouldn’t allow the phone to fold.
Around 100 million foldable devices might be developed in 2018
The head of Kolon Industries, Kang Chung-seok stated that the first foldable devices might be released in 2017 and will have a bend radius of 5 millimeters, much more compared to the speculated 1 millimeter. The smaller the bend radius, the greater the material's flexibility. The CEO said that the ideal 1-millimeter radius, which allows both sides of the phone to almost touch, might cause some safety issues, so companies will most likely start with a 5mm radius and then gradually reduce it in later models.
More and more phone manufactures, like Samsung, LG, XIaomi and Sony, are gradually moving away from liquid-crystal screens to organic light-emitting diode (OLED) displays, seeing how the latter can be folded and even rolled.
The Korean tech company successfully completed the development of flexible colorless polyimide this August and intends to mass produce films for about 100 million units of foldable phones in 2018.
One of the smartphone manufacturers to be working on foldable phones is Samsung. The South Korean company intends to launch two types of foldable smartphones and observe market behavior, before mass-producing them.