One of the things that could significantly push Samsung as the leader in the smartphone market is the delivery of a device with a foldable screen. This could happen as the company announced that they are planning the introduction of a foldable smartphone in 2018.
When you take a look at the evolution of the cell phones from their early days to present we can notice how they improved. Currently, manufacturers reached a spot from where it is quite hard to deliver anything revolutionary. They increased display size, the resolution went to insane 4k figures, we are getting 6 and even 8 GB of RAM, octa core processors are a normal thing, plenty of internal storage, and so on. Question is where to go from here? What can be further improved?
One of the answers might be a foldable display that Samsung currently is working on. At this point, it is not clear if some of the rivals are developing something similar, but certainly, they have set their goals in this direction.
Head of mobile Koh Dong-jin stated that there are “hurdles to overcome” if they want to make this a reality. He also added, “We are digging thoroughly into several issues.” Rumors about this came all the way back in 2013 at the Consumer Electronics Show, and with the development of the technology for Galaxy Edge, they came one step closer to realizing their plan. Sources close to the company and analyst suggest that there is a real possibility for this to happen during the next year.
One of the Chinese startups stated in 2016 that they will have the foldable device by the end of the year and that their tech is relying on graphene. At this point, there are still no working devices with this possibility.
This is without a doubt a huge tech leap for the market, but another problem might be the readiness of the app creators for something like this. IHS Market analyst Jusy Hong said: “What makes smartphones smarter is applications, especially third-party applications. If you have a foldable phone but most of your applications are not supporting foldable features… it would be meaningless.”
Anyhow, Samsung is still struggling to overcome last year fiasco regarding its Note 7 devices that for no obvious reason burst into flames in some cases. This cost South Korean tech giant lots of money and reputation but it seems that things have turned around. Note 8 device has been launched recently, and it immediately received 650,000 pre-orders.
