• Samsung is Working on Flexible Screens for Smartphones and Tablets

    // Gradly // blog, News, Samsung, Tech. 2 Responses

    Galaxy Skin

    During a call to discuss Samsung’s most recent financial results, the company’s spokesman, Robert Yi, said that Samsung was working on a flexible display for its upcoming smartphones and tablets. Samsung hopes to introduce flexible displays to its smartphone lineup in as early as 2012

    “The flexible display, we are looking to introduce sometime in 2012, hopefully the earlier part,” said spokesman Robert Yi during an earnings call. “The application probably will start from the handset side.”

    Yi said tablets and other mobile devices with flexible displays would follow.”

    Samsung has already shown flexible screen technology in the past, with the OLED display held inside rigid cases that kept them curved.

    The new Samsung Galaxy Skin will feature an AMOLED display that will allow the phone to bend around a cylinder with a 1-inch diameter. Brighter than the normal screen, the AMOLED display is also low-energy and almost unbreakable, according to the reports.

    Using a plastic polyimide substrate instead of glass, Samsung has produced displays that are “rollable and bendable” and which can even “survive blows from a hammer”. The phone was developed by Prof Haeseong Jee and Jye Yeon You.

    The key material of this new technology is ‘graphene’, touted as “the miracle material”. Research by scientists from Columbia University has established that ‘graphene’ is the strongest material in the world, “some 200 times stronger than structural steel”.

    The Galaxy Skin will offer a high-resolution 800×480 flexible AMOLED screen, eight megapixel camera and 1Gb of RAM as well as a 1.2GHz processor. Samsung has not yet disclosed the device’s operating system, but there have been rumors about Jelly Bean – Google’s next Android release after Ice Cream Sandwich – or a new release called Android Flexy.

    The new core technology also allows the phone to be used as a mouse, a clock or a wrist-watch. Samsung has not confirmed the exact date of release.

  • Samsung Announces 2560 x 1600 Pixel at 300 dpi Display for Tablets

    // Gradly // blog, Gadgets, iPad, News, Rants & Raves, Tech. No Responses

    At the SID Display Week 2011 International Symposium, Samsung will demonstrate the first 10.1-inch display with 2560 x 1600 pixel resolution made for tablets. It offers an “ultra-high resolution”, LCD at 300dpi. According to Samsung’s press release, The prototype demonstration marks the first time this resolution has been available for the tablet market in the popular – 10.1-inch – format, rivaling the highest resolution smartphone displays now on the market.

    The display also relies on the PenTile technology, developed by Nouvoyance, which allows for 40% less power consumption and two-thirds number of subpixels.

    Because tablets are regularly used for viewing rich-colored images, the 10.1-inch 300 dpi display is ideal for applications that require extraordinary image and text clarity such as browsing the web and viewing high-definition movies, or reading books and spreadsheets.

    In order to develop tablets with the form and function that consumers demand, a design engineer ultimately has to determine how to get the highest resolution display possible, while still fitting within the overall power budget for their design”

    “Samsung’s PenTile display technology is the only display technology that operates at 40 percent less power yet provides twice that of Full HD-viewing performance for consumers compared to legacy RGB stripe LCDs. There is no other commercial display technology on the market today that offers this high of a resolution and pixel density in a 10.1-inch size display,” said Dr. Sungtae Shin, Senior VP of Samsung Electronics.

    Definitely this announcement opens the door to the possibility of having a “Retina Display” on Apple’s iPad which sports a 9.7-inch Samsung panel at 1024 x 768 pixel. Is this technology able to fit a double resolution 2048 x 1536 pixel for next iPads?

    Samsung expects to have commercial availability of this technology for tablet applications later this year.