Last year’s appearance of flexible displays, including Samsung’s Galaxy Fold and Huawei’s Mate X stimulated our curiosity and only whet our appetite for more. This year’s Consumer Electronics Show laid down a smorgasbord of flexible screens that the makers of these gadgets hope to satisfy all our cravings for more similar innovative products.
Lenovo’s offering of the ThinkPad X1 Fold Tablap opens up into a 13.3-inch tablet or folds halfway into a mini laptop and you can either bring up a virtual keyboard or snap on a Bluetooth keyboard. Lenovo promised the ThinkPad X1 Fold will be available in major outlets and stores by mid-2020, price starting at US$2,499.
TCL Largest TV manufacturing entity in China unveiled a smartphone line under its own brand name that includes 3 fold-able prototypes . The clam shell design of one prototype is like the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip the display bends on its self
It can be used folded you get one display approximately 3.3” screen. Unfold it once and you’ve got 2 touch screens wide of display you can use. Unfold it once more and you’ll get the full 10” tablet with a 3 thousand resolution display. Folded it is just a 6.65-inch smartphone .
The next prototype model rolls out from a 6.75” to a 7.8” display at a push of a button. The AMOLED screen is tucked underneath the phone casing and extends the whole display sideways direction.
“Is it a phone? What is it?” TCL’s general manager of global marketing Stefan Streit asks. He just wants to be sure that the folding phones prototypes will eventually evolve from a novelty to an accepted mainstream technology. TCL has realized the need to make sure their foldables has to fall into one of the main categories of phablets or tablaps tablets that can unfold into a mini laptop or create its own innovative phone category.
The hardware will be really impressive as the TCL foldable phones may well make a category of its own. A below the competition price point of each foldable phone is the company’s focal point. Being a display panel manufacturing company will help lower the final selling price.
There are lots of noise as to the anticipated launch date for the foldables but the company may have more for its customers at the Mobile World Congress 2020 in Barcelona next month. Best prediction is late 2020 release but still very fluid nothing is set in stone.
TCL is poised to get a big chunk of the foldable phones market that all of the big brands like Samsung and Huawei are currently dominating. The biggest factor may well be affordability and innovative model choices. TCL may still produce the most aggressively priced foldable brand model much like the Ford T sedan that made automobiles cheaply for its customers.
Source: ABACUS