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In recent months, we have seen a number of designs envisioning flexible mobile phones. Whereas that had been a thing of fiction until now, eminent vendors are working hard on the concept and they may be able to deliver a real, flexible phone by 2013, experts have estimated.

Researchers at the R&D divisions of many companies, including Nokia and Samsung, have been working on such flexible handsets which be turned and twisted and yet wouldn’t be damaged in the least. Flexible displays are already a thing of the past, pioneered on the commercial scale by Amazon in its Kindle e-readers.

But a greater challenge has been to affix these flexible displays with similar flexible bodies. In other words, the rest of the components used in a mobile device also need to be flexible.

Samsung has long been working on flexible OLED technology and hopes to deliver smartphones making use of this technology which would be “foldable, rollable, wearable and more, [and] will allow for a high degree of durability through their use of a plastic substrate that is thinner, lighter and more flexible than… conventional LCD technology.”

One of the main reasons for the rather slow progress on this front is that fully flexible devices are bound to be expensive. That is why, many vendors such as LG Displays are already producing flexible displays but not entire, flexible devices. Flexible displays are also very useful when used in smartphones and other such devices which are often prone to falls and cracks.

At Cambridge University, researchers are taking yet another approach to the development of flexible phones. They have their energies focused on a special material, graphene, which is essentially one-atom thick sheet of carbon.

One of these researchers, Professor Ferrari, says, “We are working on flexible, bendable and transparent displays and surfaces that could in future be part of flexible phones, tablets, TVs and solar cells.”

A fleeting glance over the tech landscape does reveal how numerous vendors are just on the verge of developing a handset that will be truly flexible. We can expect that to happen sometime in 2013 and, most argue, Samsung may be the one to lead the charge.

Courtesy: BBC

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