We’ve Been Using Folding Displays All Wrong – This Speaker Concept Shows Flexible Screens Done Right

I can say with a great degree of confidence that every single company that’s made (and sold) a folding phone is absolutely shooting in the dark. They have no intention of abandoning their regular phones for foldables, but are purely engaging in a ‘display of innovation’ to show who’s doing folding hardware better. The fundamental problem still remains – do we even need folding phones? What would we even use them for?

Honestly, I don’t think we do, because there’s no task that’s so crucial that it requires a massive screen that folds in half in your pocket. The major bulk of smartphone users don’t need to watch Netflix at random moments in the day, they don’t multitask on their phones either, and browsing the internet on a square display is just fabulous… said nobody ever. Folding phones are absolutely unnecessary… but folding displays still have some merit. It’s just that we’ve been looking at them wrong. Meet Divid, a smart speaker with a folding display that presents a perfect use-case for flexible display units.

Designers: Jooahn Yoon & JBNU Industrial Design Club

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Divid isn’t your average smart speaker that plays music or tells you the weather. It’s a hybrid IoT device capable of a bunch of things. The speaker comes with a Toblerone-like shape, sporting a display that sits on one of its inclined edges. The display can either open flat, sitting like a canvas on an easel, or fold backwards, wrapping around the Toblerone to give you a two-part screen that faces both front and back… and the implications for this are incredible.

The ability to have a smart display or a smart speaker with a flexible display opens up a lot of work-related avenues. The Divid makes for a great unit to have at a concierge desk, a retail setup, at a meeting table, or even mounted on walls as a way-finding device. The screen folds open when you need something singular, and folds over to face the person opposite you when you need them to look at data like statistics, notes, cards, previews, invoice details, booking details, or even payment confirmations. The speaker just augments the Divid’s abilities, allowing for audio cues as well as music.

Being a smart speaker, it would probably work well at home too, displaying different information on both halves of the screen like allowing kids to watch different shows while facing each other at the dinner table! Divid’s designer also highlighted a rather novel way to extend your television’s screen simply by popping a Divid speaker on one side to give you extra screen estate.

While the Divid is still a conceptual device, it does something that smartphones haven’t been able to do – highlight the usefulness of a folding display by putting it to actual good use. For long, folding smartphones have felt like a solution looking for a problem. By actually thinking of ways a folding screen could be useful, Divid actually gives flexible AMOLEDs a true purpose.

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The Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Fold is proof that a foldable tablet/laptop is a better idea than a foldable phone

“The single biggest challenge is the screen itself”, says Kevin Beck, Senior Story Technologist at Lenovo (although I’m not entirely sure what that title means). Beck’s statement is rather revealing, as it’s a complete affirmation of the fact that a folding laptop/tablet is a MUCH better idea than a folding phone. Phones are used/opened hundreds of times each day, compounding to thousands of times in just two weeks alone. Laptops/tablets, on the other hand, are ‘opened’ much less often, which translates to a dramatic decrease in the stress taken by a folding display. Moreover, laptops and tablets can usually afford to be thicker than phones, which gives you a lot of leeway to build a better hinge that can withstand friction, and constant folding, and is therefore built to last for years.

Meet the ThinkPad X1 Fold from Lenovo, a laptop-tablet hybrid that celebrates its foldability. In a world where MacBooks don’t look like books, we’ve got ourselves a ThinkPad that opens like one! Now in its second iteration, the ‘next gen’ Thinkpad X1 Fold sports a slimmer design with thinner bezels and a much larger screen with a 16-inch diagonal (as compared to the 13.3-inch one on the previous ThinkPad X1 Fold from 2020). The tablet folds right down the center, sort of like a book, giving you a slim device that’s easy to carry and versatile enough to be used in a variety of formats. You can use it as a tablet in conjunction with a stylus, or fold it in an L-shaped format and use it as you would a laptop… albeit with a touchscreen keyboard underneath your fingertips. If you want a more analog experience, there’s a mechanical keyboard attachment too that wirelessly connects to your X1 Fold, and a stand that you can prop your device onto, turning it into sort of a desktop-style experience.

Designer: Lenovo

On paper, the ThinkPad X1 Fold boasts some rather commendable specs. It sports a 12th Gen Intel Core™ i7 processor on the inside, with the ability to go up to 32GB LPDDR5 memory and 1TB storage. The 16.3-inch OLED display has a 4:3 resolution when completely open, bringing it to 3:2 when folded in half (that’s 15:10, which is just about comparable to the 16:9 aspect ratio found on regular laptops). The X1 Fold can be used solo or configured with an optional magnetic-attach pen utilizing Wacom protocol for a true tablet-esque experience. For laptop-lovers who need a tactile keyboard, the ThinkPad X1 Fold offers an optional full-size backlit ThinkPad keyboard, with TrackPoint and
large haptic touchpad.

The beauty of the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Fold lies in its versatility. The company touts that the device can be used in 5 different modes – the clamshell laptop mode, landscape ‘desktop’ mode with the keyboard, portrait desktop mode with the keyboard (a unique template that Lenovo claims really excited early users), book mode, and finally tablet mode with either the touchscreen input or the stylus. “Productivity, collaboration, content consumption, reading, writing, editing, and so on are all a breeze in whichever mode one feels most comfortable with”, Lenovo says. “The modes are managed by an intuitive Mode Switcher interface”

The hybrid folding tablet comes with a camera array that’s placed on the shorter edge of the bezel (sort of like on the iPad). This means it faces you when you’re using it in laptop mode. Multiple microphones placed along the sides of the bezel help with orientation and spatial awareness, allowing the X1 Fold to be used in a variety of ways.

The one largest drawback with a 16-inch folding tablet is the battery life, given that it’s powering such a massive display. The ThinkPad X1 Fold comes with a 48Wh battery on the inside that is intelligently managed by the tablet’s chip to optimize performance based on usage. When left idle, the X1 Fold’s display automatically dims to save battery, and when you walk away from the device, the screen automatically shuts off, saving power. It even auto-wakes when you return, so you can pick up right where you left off.

With all those impressive specs and abilities, the ThinkPad X1 Fold won’t come cheap. It begins shipping in November with a starting price of $2499. Higher specs will cost you more, and the keyboard, stand, and stylus are sold as optional accessories.

The price, however high it may be, is a factor of exactly how impressive and innovative this little gizmo is. Folding displays aren’t quite mainstream yet, and folding laptop/tablets are practically inexistent as a category barring a few models. The ThinkPad X1 Fold hopes to pave the way to a future where such devices are much more commonplace, resulting in a robust supply chain and eventually… eventually, a lower price tag!

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Samsung Galaxy Fold Mini concept comes with vertical wraparound screen that opens into a wide tablet

The only part of the phone that isn’t a screen is its camera bump.

It’s safe to say that we’re still in the age of folding displays, although the pandemic, a supply chain crisis, and a war have definitely caused innovation to slump a bit. That being said, if there’s one company that still has any bandwidth to push out folding phones, it’s probably Samsung. (In fact, just this Sunday, images of the Galaxy Z Flip4 leaked online to confirm the company’s efforts)

The biggest problem with folding displays isn’t the crease, contrary to popular belief, it’s the lack of a proper template. Before the iPhone defined what phones would look like for the next decade, mobile phones came in all sorts of shapes and sizes. You had the popular candybar, the clamshell, the slider, and whatever the Nokia N93 was. As we move towards a new era of folding displays, the age-old problem makes a comeback – what’s the perfect format? Samsung’s explored the book-inspired format with the Galaxy Fold, the clamshell format with the Z Flip, and it seems like this new concept proposes yet another direction – I call it the ‘parchment scroll’ format.

Designer: Alexander Bazilewskiy

The Samsung Galaxy Fold Mini builds on the company’s folding range with a new format. Colloquially dubbed the ‘parchment scroll’ format, this concept comes with a single vertical display that comes with two folding points – on the upper and lower edges of the phone. Sort of like a scroll that can be expanded vertically either by unrolling the top or the bottom, the Galaxy Fold Mini can open out on the top and the bottom, making a dramatically longer phone. Tilt it over horizontally and you’ve got an incredibly widescreen display that’s perfect for multitasking.

While unlocking multitasking capabilities, and providing a screen long enough to watch two movies simultaneously, what the Fold Mini also does is create a unique screen layout when closed. The wraparound screen’s edge acts as an incredible notification bar (the image above), while the smaller halves of the screen that fold backward create an interesting camera interface that allows you to use the primary camera lenses for clicking natural selfies. The upper screen serves as a viewfinder, while the lower houses the camera controls, creating something that feels incredibly natural.

This format has some great pros. A single-screen means less worrying about what to do when your phone is closed (the Galaxy Fold and Z Flip needed a secondary screen), and this layout doesn’t just cut the number of screens, it cuts the number of cameras too, since there’s no ‘front facing’ camera on this concept the way there is in other folding phones. Just turn your phone over and you’ve got a camera as well as a screen waiting to greet you, whether it’s for selfies or video calls.

The most obvious con, however, is that there isn’t an immediate need for a phone with such a widescreen display. When opened, the Samsung Galaxy Fold Mini concept has what I imagine is somewhere near a 30:9 ratio, considering it’s a 16:9 screen multiplied by 2 (the front as well as the back). Aside from multitasking (how much multitasking is anyone really doing?), the need for a wider screen isn’t entirely apparent, although it’s the kind of thing only the future can tell us. I didn’t think we needed screens on our wrists, but here we are with smartwatches being such a runaway success. What this concept does, however, is speculate – which is arguably one of the most important acts in designing for the future. What are your thoughts?

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Absurd Apple Watch concept with folding display makes me question my sanity

Finally, a large display for your wrist wearable.

While the world’s wondering when Apple will launch their folding iPhone, someone went ahead and made a Watch with a folding display… because why not. Titled the Apple Watch Series X, this quirky concept gives you a smartwatch with a larger folding screen, allowing you to use it as a de-facto iPhone. After all, your watch can make phone calls, right? The Apple Watch Series X is your regular foldable, in the sense that it comes with a primary screen on the front, and opens like a book to reveal a ‘larger’ secondary screen on the inside. Obviously, I use the word ‘larger’ rather loosely, considering how small the Apple Watch’s form factor is, to begin with.

Designed to sit on your wrist, this foldable concept turns the square-shaped WatchOS interface into a more traditional landscape one, unlocking the possibility for a lot of regular apps to make their way onto the wristwatch, including better Netflix and YouTube watching experiences.

Designer: Liquid Silicone

The Series X watch concept has a unique design with a flat-edge that we had expected Apple to debut in 2021. The screen size remains the same, although a bridge on the left edge (with Apple’s branding) hides the folding mechanism (sort of like in Samsung’s Galaxy Fold). You can use the watch as-is, although when you open it, you’re greeted with a widescreen that gives you a better layout of elements – especially for the fitness app, displayed below.

Sure the idea for a foldable watch seems absurd at first, although if you think about it – this format isn’t new. The Galaxy Z-Flip does the exact same thing, with a square-shaped device that opens into a vertical phone – the Series X simply flips this template onto its side.

Does it then make sense for Apple to launch a folding smartwatch? HELL NO! Sure, a larger display on your wrist makes things better, but the scaling of the display, in this case, isn’t absolute, i.e., the larger display still has the same height as the smaller one. If Apple WERE to launch a foldable, it would make much more sense to do so with a display that actually needs folding – take this iPhone iPad hybrid for starters. Or I wouldn’t mind a folding MacBook too, in the format of this FlexBook concept!

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Want to build your own folding phone? Royole’s DIY flexible display kit lets you experiment with foldable tech

From the company that created the world’s first folding phone comes an open-source kit to help anyone build their own products with flexible displays!

Royole has shown an incredible ability to find the right niche and pivot at the right time with their technological offerings. The company arguably built the first-ever flexible smartphone – the FlexPai – outpacing even Samsung, and their RoKit now aims at helping democratize the fully flexible display (FFD), so creatives and designers can tinker with it, building their own products too.

This means you could practically build your own folding smartphone (like how Scotty Allen’s been trying make his own folding iPhone). Royole’s even showcased an example of what they would make and it looks rather impressive. A baton-shaped device with a rolled-up on the inside and a massive camera facing outwards. Sort of like unscrolling a parchment, the display rolls outwards. It isn’t a folding phone in strict terms (it’s more of a rolling phone), but the idea Royole is getting at is that with their kit, you can now prototype something absolutely absurd; something that even Apple, Google, Samsung, or Microsoft is too scared to make!

The RoKit comes packaged in a pretty impressive aluminum briefcase (scroll for the images below), containing everything you need to bring your unique tech idea to life. The upper part of the briefcase houses Royole’s 3rd Generation Cicada Wing 7.8-inch fully flexible touch-sensitive display, while the lower half of the briefcase contains a development motherboard running Android 10, an HDMI adapter (in case you want to connect your flexible display to an existing computer like a Raspberry Pi, smartphone, laptop, or any other gadget), and a bunch of power cables for good measure.

The idea behind the RoKit, says Royole Founder and CEO Dr. Bill Liu, is to “invite every industry to imagine and design with flexibility in mind, unfolding new possibilities for creators and accelerating the development of flexible solutions in all walks of life.” Envisioned as the world’s first open platform flexible electronics development kit, the RoKit allows other creators to do exactly what Royole did with the FlexPai in 2018 – create electronic products that the world has never seen before.

For now, the RoKit is available for purchase on the Royole website in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, and China. Priced at $959, it definitely isn’t cheap, although one could make the case that it’s just about affordable for being able to test out and prototype a product before you actually develop it with mass-produced flexible displays.

Designer: Royole

Royole just launched a DIY ‘Flexible Display Kit’ to help anyone build and prototype folding tech products!

From the company that created the world’s first folding phone comes an open-source kit to help anyone build their own products with flexible displays!

Royole has shown an incredible ability to find the right niche and pivot at the right time with their technological offerings. The company arguably built the first-ever flexible smartphone – the FlexPai – outpacing even Samsung, and their RoKit now aims at helping democratize the fully flexible display (FFD), so creatives and designers can tinker with it, building their own products too.

The kit comes packaged in a pretty impressive aluminum briefcase, containing everything you need to bring your unique tech idea to life. The upper part of the briefcase houses Royole’s 3rd Generation Cicada Wing 7.8-inch fully flexible touch-sensitive display, while the lower half of the briefcase contains a development motherboard running Android 10, an HDMI adapter (in case you want to connect your flexible display to an existing computer like a Raspberry Pi, smartphone, laptop, or any other gadget), and a bunch of power cables for good measure.

The idea behind the RoKit, says Royole Founder and CEO Dr. Bill Liu, is to “invite every industry to imagine and design with flexibility in mind, unfolding new possibilities for creators and accelerating the development of flexible solutions in all walks of life.” Envisioned as the world’s first open platform flexible electronics development kit, the RoKit allows other creators to do exactly what Royole did with the FlexPai in 2018 – create electronic products that the world has never seen before.

To show how limitless their flexible displays can be, Royole’s even created a few conceptual products that highlight exactly how folding screens can make products sleeker, smaller, and better. The examples include (as shown below) handheld gimbals/cameras with slide-out displays, a slick monolithic computer that transitions magically from keyboard to screen (I wonder where they got that idea from), and even a helmet with a rear display that contours perfectly to the shape of the head, allowing you to communicate efficiently with drivers behind you.

For now, the RoKit is available for purchase on the Royole website in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, and China. Priced at $959, it definitely isn’t cheap, although one could make the case that it’s just about affordable for being able to test out and prototype a product before you actually develop it with mass-produced flexible displays.

Designer: Royole

LG’s Foldable + flexible OLED screen can be carried like a folio bag!

A foldable phone and rollable TV are considered passe – that is the bane of innovation that finds us always looking for the next big thing! But, soon, you will be able to wear a screen around the wrist or even carry a display like a briefcase. If this scenario seems animated, industrial designer Kevin Chiam has stretched the limits of flexibility and conceived a portable LG branded OLED screen that you can carry along like a folio bag.

Companies like LG, TCL, Royole (the Chinese manufacturer who pioneered foldable phones), and more brands have experimented with rollable, bendable, and stretchable displays. The concept Chaim has envisioned for LG, however, throws open the domain for more enticing applications. It is directed toward the urban nomads working remotely and are always on the move, ready to explore options at work, home, and anywhere in between.

Dubbed the Folio – visibly because of its shape inspired by a folio bag – this conceptual display design works as a modular entertainment system featuring an extremely thin yet flexible 32-inch LG OLED screen with a leather back. The screen is fastened by cylindrical aluminum arms – with integrated magnetic clasps – on either end, and it can fold up in the middle and close seamlessly with the magnetic clasps. In addition, the display becomes its own carrying case has a handle attached to it for convenience on the go.

When unfolded, the display has infinite uses – entertainment, gaming, or even to display digital information and artwork. In addition, the magnetic clasps on the arms in the display’s open orientation can be used to connect speakers, cameras, and other accessories to the screen. Being extremely flexible and modular in design, the Folio complements a user’s ever-changing lifestyle by transitioning between work and play!

Designer: Kevin Chiam

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