Phones with foldable displays have been around for a few years, and laptops and tablets with foldable screens are starting to arrive. But Samsung is starting to show off something a little different: a tablet with a slideable display.
During the Intel Innovate 2022 day one keynote, Samsung Display CEO JS Choi demonstrated a prototype of the company’s first 17 inch slideable display.
Rather than a phone that becomes a tablet, Choi said this screen allows a small tablet to become a big tablet when you slide one edge to expand the screen.
There’s no word on when we’ll actually start to see this display used in actual products. And only a single static image was shown on the display during the on-stage demo at Intel Innovate, so it’s unclear how well the screen works for real-world applications.
But it’s the latest indication that flexible display technology can be used for more than foldables. It’s also an indication that Samsung may want to differentiate its “slideable” display from other expandable displays.
For example, LG was using similar display technology to build a smartphone with an expandable display. But the planned LG Rollable smartphone was canceled when the company decided to shut down its smartphone division last year, and the phone was never released to the public.
Chinese phone maker Oppo also showed off a rollable phone prototype last year, but that phone was never released to the public either.
For its part, Samsung has been talking about Slideable displays for a while. Maybe Intel’s decision to highlight the latest prototype on the same stage where the company officially launched its 13th-gen Core processor lineup and announced the release date and price for its Arc A770 desktop GPU could be an indicator that Samsung’s slideable displays are nearly ready for release. Or maybe it’s just the latest in a line of events where a tech company shows off some futuristic tech that may or may not ever actually see the light of day.
I may be wrong on this, but I suspect these displays will suffer the same problem of non foldable/rollable OLEDs – being too expensive at first, if not always.
Not because it’s new tech and novelty factor… it’s because OLED displays have a high rejection and failure rate, so it costs more to do them, production is also limited, and the problem gets worse the bigger the display is. For foldables it must be even worse.
I do like the concept and idea though… I have made trips when I didn’t carry a laptop and could do all I needed on a tablet, being able to stretch the screen a bit would ease things up. It’s just… not enough of a change to pay too much for. Perhaps there are some markets that actually need something like this, for me it’d be more a matter of convenience…
Yeah, for normal consumers it’s a “cool” and “nice to have” feature but not “must have” (as in indispensable and not in the really really want it meaning)
One situation where I could see it being really handy would be in a hospital setting. Carry the tablet around in the small form factor for checking charts and normal files and then when you need to look at digital results of scans you can increase the screen size to get a better picture of what’s going on with the patient.
Unfortunately I don’t work in medicine so for me it’d be read on the small screen and then widen it to enjoy a movie and that’s about it.
And OLED displays burn-in, they don’t last “near forever” like LCD displays.
I still find this concept more interesting than foldables. Hope they will put this into real products some time soon.