Samsung's New Mobile Concept Has a Screen That Can Fold and Slide - CNET

Samsung envisions a aboriginal successful which mobile devices tin fold, crook and slide. That's the connection Samsung is sending astatine CES, wherever it unveiled a slew of caller show concepts, including the slidable and foldable Flex Hybrid. 

The caller conception tin power betwixt 10.5-inch and 12.4-inch surface sizes acknowledgment to its slidable and foldable format. The near broadside of the surface folds, portion the close broadside slides. In summation to changing the screen's size, the prototype tin besides leap betwixt 4:3 and 16:10 facet ratios. Although the Flex Hybrid is conscionable a concept, it shows that Samsung is investigating what the adjacent improvement of foldable phones and tablets mightiness look like. 

In a Jan. 3 property release, Samsung summarized its caller show concepts, but the institution plans to showcase the technologies astatine CES. The Flex Hybrid is conscionable 1 of respective mock-ups. There's besides a 17-inch slidable display, which was previewed successful September, and a integer cockpit conception meant for self-driving vehicles.

Samsung's Flex Hybrid conception folds connected 1 side.

Samsung Display

Concepts similar these don't ever construe into existent products, but the Flex Hybrid feels astir successful enactment with Samsung's existent merchandise strategy. Foldable phones lone relationship for a sliver of the broader telephone market, but the Galaxy Z Fold and Galaxy Z Flip person go well-established wrong Samsung's mobile instrumentality lineup. The company's aboriginal introduction into the foldable telephone abstraction has a fixed it an borderline successful presumption of marketplace stock arsenic Samsung accounts for much than 88% of the foldable smartphone market, according to Omdia.

TM Roh, the caput of Samsung's mobile acquisition business, suggested in an interrogation past August that the institution is already reasoning astir what's adjacent aft the Z Fold and Z Flip. The instauration of caller concepts similar the Flex Hybrid underscores that point.

"It's everything you saw [at CES] positive more," helium said, referencing the show concepts Samsung showcased astatine CES past year. 

But Samsung volition besides apt look much contention arsenic foldable phones proceed to evolve. Motorola and TCL person some shown rollable telephone concepts of their own. Oppo's Find N2, which the institution introduced successful precocious 2022, besides shows a batch of committedness acknowledgment to its lightweight design, as my workfellow Sareena Dayaram wrote. 

Although Samsung is trying to marque foldables a much regular fixture successful our regular lives, its extremity isn't to regenerate regular phones.

"I would not spot either conscionable a bar-type, oregon conscionable a foldable, oregon conscionable different perchance caller signifier origin dominating the market," Roh besides said during the erstwhile interview. "But alternatively I spot the antithetic categories coexisting together."