Samsung Youm Brand Dreams Up Ideas for Bendable Displays

While Samsung Display, a Samsung-created entity, is responsible for the bendable organic light-emitting diode (OLED) screens, they’ll be marketed under the new brand Youm.

Brian Berkeley, vice president of the Samsung San Jose Display Lab, said his team had figured out how to make a “high-resolution display on extremely thin plastic, instead of glass, so it won’t break, even if it’s dropped.”

The plastic displays are OLEDs, which Berkeley said deliver the best quality viewing, “with much deeper blacks and more vivid colors.” They’re thin and lightweight, and because they emit their own light, they don’t need a backlight.

No doubt about it, they are thin …

… and they are bendable.

The plastic screens seem to have the flexibility of a strip of photo negatives. While they bend forward and backward, folding appears not to be an option.

Berkeley smiled and paused for a moment, as though at the gravity of what he was about to show off—a device with a screen that spilled down over its sides.

And here is the view of the device from the side.

Samsung’s Woo rolled a short film that included two more ideas for possible applications for the bendable screen technology. A first idea was somewhat book-like, behaving like a smartphone when closed and a tablet when open. (What was that we said about the plastic being unable to bend?)

A character in the film, impressed, takes a closer look.

A second prototype idea was roughly the shape and size of a harmonica, with a hidden—and rather large—plastic screen that extended with the touch of a button. Impressive, indeed.