Flexible OLED displays have been around for a few years now, however their implementations in consumer devices have so far been limited to putting the flexible panel behind a rigid piece of protective glass. Samsung Display has just announced the next step up from that: a flexible OLED panel that has a transparent plastic cover already attached, emulating the properties of glass but retaining the screen’s innate flexibility. Without the need for glass, this screen has proven rugged enough to be certified by UL (formerly known as Underwriters Laboratories) for its durability.
Samsung, describing the new panel as unbreakable, reports that it has withstood UL’s military-standards tests of 26 successive drops from a height of 1.2 meters (close to 4 feet) as well as extreme temperatures as high as 71 degrees Celsius (159.8°F) and as low as -32 degrees Celsius (-25.6°F). The OLED display “continued to function normally with no damage to its front, sides, or edges,” we’re told, and Samsung even went further by performing a successful drop test from 1.8 meters (6 feet).
Obviously developed primarily for smartphones, this new flexible OLED panel will also be offered for use in other electronic devices such as portable game consoles, military devices, e-learning tablets, and in-car displays. Samsung Display isn’t offering a timeline for when we might expect a release of any products with the supposedly unbreakable OLED panel inside them, and it has yet to announce mass production of the new component. So while the new screen sounds exciting, we should probably restrain our enthusiasm until it gets closer to showing up in real devices.
The Samsung unbreakable panel continued to function normally with no damage to its front, sides or edges despite being subjected to drop tests at 1.2 m (~4 ft.) above the ground 26 times in succession, and accompanying high (71°C) and low (-32°C) temperature tests. Even in subsequent 1.8 m (~6 ft.) drop tests, which is significantly higher than the US military standard, the unbreakable panel operated normally with no sign of damage.
The newly developed display is expected to find viable markets on smartphones as well as other electronic products such as display consoles on automobiles, mobile military devices, portable game consoles and tablet PCs.
Samsung’s announcement for its flexible and unbreakable OLED panel revolves mostly around its unbreakable characteristics; but does not touch upon its scratch resistance, or its other qualities as a display that would make it a good choice on smartphones, other than simply stating that these characteristics are “very similar to glass” — a statement that has a very wide scope for interpretation. Hopefully, Samsung has more up its sleeves on that end when the product comes closer to market release on actual consumer electronics.