Samsung Infinity Flex Display Looks Like a Winner (Premium)

Samsung finally unveiled its first-ever foldable display design today. Folks, this is no gimmick. It’s easy to see how a smartphone with this display could very easily realize the hybrid dream that so many other devices have failed to achieve.

Samsung’s flexible display, called the Infinity Flex Display, wasn’t the only major announcement at Wednesday’s Samsung Developer Conference 2018 in San Francisco. The consumer electronics giant also announced a dramatic expansion of its Bixby digital personal assistant and that it will clean up the user experience of its smartphones.

But the Infinity Flex Display was the star of the show, and rightfully so. We’ve been anticipating flexible displays for years now, and it looks like Samsung—the world’s biggest maker of smartphones, and, more important, the creator of the world’s very best displays—will take this technology from science fiction to reality as soon as 2019.

And that’s what was so striking about the Samsung demonstration. This isn’t a theoretical advance, like the nearly-pointless dual-screen device prototypes (like Courier and, more recently, Andromeda) that Microsoft has been working on for years. It’s a mainstream device, tied to a really popular platform, that is immediately and obviously useful.

This is a device that you can carry in your pocket and use as a smartphone. But when you have need of more on-screen real estate, you can unfold the device and access a display that is the same height, but three times the width, of the outside display. It is, essentially, both a smartphone and a mini-tablet. And if you could connect to a keyboard and/or mouse, as is the case with Samsung’s current smartphones and Dex docking solutions, it’s also a PC.

This solves real-world problems in ways that today’s hybrid devices do not. A Surface Pro, for example, is an excellent PC, but it’s a lackluster tablet for most because the ecosystem isn’t there. An iPad Pro, meanwhile, is a terrific tablet, but the lack of high-quality productivity software, for now, and its multitasking and navigation limitations make it less than ideal for PC-type tasks.

A Samsung smartphone with an Infinity Flex Display won’t immediately be a great PC. You can look at the current situation with DeX to see why that’s the case. But even a first-generation Infinity Flex Display-based device will eliminate the need for a tablet. And for many customers—including me, by the way—that is an immediate benefit.

I prescribe to the “right tool for the job” philosophy, and while I agree it is theoretically a great idea to eliminate a device from the range I currently use, I’ve never found a single device that can adequately do the job of two others. So I use a smartphone for phone and camera tasks, and for light email and reading. But I also use a mini-tablet, an iPad Mini, for reading and watching movies. And I use a PC for work.

I’d like to eliminate the iPad Mini. But I find smartphones too small for reading and watching videos. But a smartphone with an Infinity Flex Display? Now I’m paying attention. That is a single device that really could do the job of two others.

Whether Samsung can evolve Dex to achieve the holy trinity of device replacement is unclear. And sort of beside the point: I’d rather see them embrace a Google platform (Android/Chrome OS) for this solution and not go their own way. For its part, Samsung says it is collaborating with Google on this design, and I see that as a good sign.

But no matter: As is so often the case with its innovative hardware designs, Samsung will also inspire other platform makers to release their own flexible display devices. Some will be based on Google platforms. Apple will no doubt jump in. And so, too, will Microsoft.

No offense to Microsoft, but the biggest immediate benefits are to the smartphone world, and that means that Google/Android and Apple/iPhone will/would benefit most right up front. An iPhone with a foldable display would absolutely negate the need for the iPad Mini product line, and it’s hard not to imagine a “Pro” keyboard case that would, in effect, turn it into an iPad Pro of sorts.

What’s not particularly enticing is a two-display device that can be held like a paper book. The point isn’t emulating old user interfaces from the past, but pushing forward with new designs that make sense now and in the future.

I’m excited by the possibilities here. And, yes, I’m curious to see how Microsoft might offer some unique value here, though I am doubtful that the desktop-focused Windows makes much sense on small, foldable displays. You never know.

What I do know is that this is real. And while there will be concerns about reliability and durability, about which platforms make the most sense, and so on, this will evolve just as Samsung’s phablet designs and curved display panels did. And in just a few short years from now, we’ll wonder how we ever used displays with non-foldable displays.

Folks, we just saw the future. This is exciting.