Bend it like Nokia: Mobile giant unveils its first foldable displays

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Despite not winning any awards at the Society for Information Display (SID) academic conference in San Diego, Nokia surprised everyone with prototypes of its flexible 5.9-inch OLED panel. The company has built two displays in collaboration with Semiconductor Energy Laboratory (SEL) Co Ltd and Advanced Film Device (AFD).

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One of the display has an amazing ability to fold to a 2mm radius which is unlike the curved displays from the likes of Samsung and LG which are flexible to a certain extent only.

Both the displays shown below are playing a video simultaneously while being bent.

The book-type display can be bend up to an extent of 2mm radius.

The three-fold display can be bent up to an extent of 4mm.

At the conference, Samsung took the gold for Display of the Year award for its 5.68-inch FHD curved AMOLED display while LG G Flex won the gold in Display Application of the Year for its 6-inch curved display. The conference was held to focus solely on display technology and some new innovative display features showcased at the event might not be readily available in devices as of now.

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It is expected that Nokia might use such technology in its future smartphones but till now, it has been trying to play safe. The company showed two of its new bendable displays last week at the conference in San Diego.

The display has been made by placing a color filter, TFT and OLED layers between two sealing layers and a flexible substrate. When its flat, the display measures 5.9 inches with a display resolution of 1280x720. One of the prototypes could be folded in half like a book while the other could be folded into three folds with a radius of 4mm. According to its developers, the displays could be folded up to 100,000 times.

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Do you think that we might soon see a release of a Nokia phone with a bendable display? Let us know in the comments.

Source: Nikkei