Originally posted by Drael646464
Originally Posted by techiez
Well yes the tech exists but still as I mentioned its years away, Samsung is expert in displays and it first showed a creaseless foldable display prototype in 2011 and still couldn't get a device to consumers utilizing the same, there are supposedly production issues with the prototypes that Samsung is working on. I dont see MS beating Samsung to market with such a phone, though I want it happen.
Creaseless displays use graphene. Graphene is currently very expensive to produce. Samsung and microsofts dual development/co-patent of this creaseless screen tech design (forget the tm name) was as you mentioned demo'd years ago. I believe it was 2013?
Could be 2011 I suppose, but I recall their co-announcement of the scroll proto being 2013, with it running windows 8.
Of course Samsung got the most attention for this co-development and co-announcement, and went on to use it, as the basis for their practically useless curved screen design, which amusing people really liked. So much so, if you search this in youtube now, all you can really find is samsungs half of the announcement (which does show windows 8 on the proto, but no Microsoft portion of the speech)
There have since been a few other companies demoing flexible OLED graphene screens. I don't think it will be a matter of any individual company being wildly 'first to market". A number of companies _can_ make such a thing, but they don't because it makes no economic sense.
Graphene of course has many more scientific applications than screens. I can be used for bullet proofing, circuit boards, battery tech, chemical manuracture, water and other purification, super materials, spaceships, nano-manufacturing. The creation of low cost graphene will be a technological revolution.
But its not here yet. Likely the first, slightly cheaper, creaseless folding/scrolling will be like the first mobile phones - so expensive as to be primarily for high end enterprise and the elite.
I can see a case there for such devices being, like the patent, a co-development between MS and Samsung. It's the sort of product one would want major press on, shared risk/investment, and premium status. Or at least running windows makes more sense than android. Ultra-elite business users won't get much productivity benefit from a folding android tablet, after all, and people are unlikely to spend that kind of money on a slightly more portable Netflix!
It will take that initial high expense product, like the original cell phones, to slowly reduce manufacturing costs, via scale and incremental improvements. It won't be a consumer product any time soon, barring some technological miracle. As such, it seems more logic its in MSFTs ballpark IMO.
Certainly such a device could run DeX, but I think the real product will be running full windows 10, with the arm emu - which is probably what MSFT is cooking up with "Andromeda", a melting point between win10m and win on arm for folding devices.
After all, such an expensive might be justified for running oracle, adobe products, office 365, accounting software, and a full suite of business applications, but snapchat or pokemon go is not really anywhere in the picture.
I guess in a way, for all the hype around AR, it'll probably be similar for awhile - its main benefit to enterprise and other people with big pockets, until production methods can improve it down to consumer scale. For an enterprise user, or in medicine, AR makes a lot of sense - even with a high expense. However we are not seeing any immediate examples of a similar quality consumer product, and given the complexities of projecting light into the eye, FoV, latency and such, I don't think we will for a long time. Maybe something lower grade.
Regardless, creaseless tech is not needed for a folding screen design. You simply need a hinge that creates a relatively low profile crease, and a UI, that is optimized to mostly conceal that crease (the tablets on westworld are a great example - they are all creased designs, but you don't notice because the UI is designed to hide it)
If you look at some pics of the oft-touted future tech, the westworld tablets, you'll see they have creases. They are not some far off graphene tech, merely folding devices that are very thin, and have low profile hinge creases, with a UI design to hide those creases.
It makes a lot of sense to make such a product, from very achievable and inexpensive existing technologies, as a development platform for a folding scaling OS of the future. Plus the OS end, requires a fair bit of development, more that slapping two screens together with a fancy hinge in likelihood. It's an enabling tech - it allows for development of the software of that eventual creaseless design, and later consumer product.
People might object to the idea of a crease all they like, but it's doubtful anyone much will be willing to pony up the many thousands an all graphene screen would cost.
Even if MSFT or whomever was working on a scrolling or creaseless design - it still wouldn't be for consumers.
The small proto, that Samsung demo'd in 2011/13/whenever cost several tens of thousands of dollars. 50,000? 40,000? Something in that ballpark.
Mass manufacture would reduce that very little, and the cost of graphene production hasn't really changed, despite one person starting to build a plant for it.
Even if they created a folding screen tech where only the hinge part was graphene based, or they significantly reduced the cost of graphene - it would likely costs many thousands at the RRP, probably 5+ thousand. Somewhere in the realm of a cheap car.
That's not the sort of money consumers will spend for portable entertainment devices, generally speaking.
Actually I don't think such tech is that far off either. Probably 3-5 years. But when it comes it will still cost A LOT. This is not the new iPhone. Its the new 80s mobile phone/90s palmpilot long before it will slowly morph into the new iPhone.
The other element to consider is the fact that CPUs, circuits and batteries can all be built theoretically into transparent graphene substrates. So the ultimate evolution is probably something more like "computer paper", created by nano-manufacturing processes. But that's an even longer journey.
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