LAS VEGAS--Samsung's Stephen Woo, president of the company's components business, showed off a prototype smartphone with a flexible display here at the Consumer Electronics Show. While the company and others have long been working on such technology, the demonstration--during a high-profile keynote address--indicates the technology is inching closer to commercial reality.
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As part of the demonstration, Samsung said it would sell flexible OLED displays under the Youm brand. The company did not provide details on the effort, including when such displays would be available to customers and how much they would cost. Samsung sells a wide range of electronics components to other manufacturers, including Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL).
During Samsung's keynote demonstration, the company showed off what appeared to be a paper-thin display that could be rolled up into a complete circle. Even while being handled, the display continued to present changing images and text.
"Imaging the products you could design with this," said Samsung's Brian Berkeley, chief of the company's display business.
Samsung also exhibited a demo phone with a flexible display. The display curved around the edges of the device, allowing messages and other information to scroll across the outermost edges of the phone.
"It's only going to get better," Berkeley said.
Interestingly, Microsoft's Eric Rudder made an appearance during Samsung's keynote presentation and said that Microsoft is testing Samsung's flexible display technology with its Windows Phone smartphone software.
Also during Samsung's keynote, the company announced its new Exynos 5 octa chipset. Woo said Samsung's Exynos line of processors have been shipped in a total of 53 million devices. The company's latest Exynos 5 octa silicon delivers "a whole new processing architecture," Woo said, with two sets of quad-core processors. Samsung said its new Exynos 5 octa relies on the "big.little" technology ARM Holdings announced last year, which pairs four Cortex A15 processors with four Cortex A7 processors. The result, Samsung said, is faster processing at lower power.
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