Back at Display Week 2021 in May, Samsung Display offered a very brief look at a swanky multi-fold smartphone prototype it was working on. Just one photo in fact. Now the concept has made it out onto the show floor at iMiD 2021.
Samsung released the first Fold phone in 2019, which offered users both a smartphone and mini-tablet experience on the same device. This handset was updated the following year, with an improved single hinge, better main display, and upgraded internals. Meanwhile a clamshell entry also appeared in 2020.
After launching the latest generation of both the Z Fold and Z Flip earlier this month, Samsung Display is showing off what might come next – a double-hinge concept that "can both in-fold and out-fold."
However, the video below doesn't show those two hinges in action, instead focusing on a demo of the kind of functionality users can expect across the 7.2-inch OLED folded-out screen. The three distinct display areas can of course be used as one big screen when folded out, or can be split into zones for multitasking.
We don't get a look around back, but there's a dual-camera array to the left of the main screen, physical buttons to the top of that panel, and a USB port to the bottom. At this early stage such things as processor, RAM and storage are pretty meaningless, and a production timeline has not been revealed either, but it does give us an interesting first look at the kinds of things Samsung expects us to do with all that pocket-friendly display real estate, and hopefully provides a preview of things to come.
Samsung Display also showed off a streaming speaker wrapped in the 12.4-inch flexible OLED screen, where that display unfurls to create a large – though with a slight convex curved – viewing area at the press of a button in a companion app. A durability test for a folding OLED screen was presented too, where the display survived 30,000 repeated folds at temperatures as low as -20 °C (-4 °F).
Source: Samsung Display
