TCL developing world's first rollable screen smartphone By AP Archive

This is TCL's wallet, foldable concept device, so this is one of the many foldable concepts that we have that we're working on. We actually have about three dozen foldable products in some stage of development at TCL. Right now, we're spending a lot of time working on concept devices at the moment, we're not really in a hurry to bring these to market. We still feel the technology is a bit rough for consumers to be purchasing this, but we certainly see this as being the future for a lot of people. A smartphone is their first screen. It's replaced their laptop in terms of what they look at more often and use most frequently, especially in terms of watching content or sending emails, and these kinds of things.

So we're really looking at some of those opportunities, but also looking at your know, is it taking the standard smartphone size that we have now, because we went larger screen and the phablets and whatnot. Can we bring that and make that smaller again? Does it look like an IOT device? Perhaps could it be in some other consumer electronic product or something so there's just so much opportunity out there, and it really is just understanding what's going to be most meaningful in the future? It's a six point. Nine inch standard display, and if you want to have that larger format, you can simply extend the display that you need this working model that we actually have. This is just a mock-up, but we do have a working model that actually has motors in it. That will make that screen movement work automatically, and then it rolls the foldable or flexible AMOLED display back into the device itself.

The foldable phones that are out on the market right now are basically prototypes that we can buy. Manufacturers are trying to make them robust enough that they don't break, but no one really knows what the workable form factor for a foldable phone will be. TCL is showing some really exciting new form factors that could actually be potential use cases for how it really works in the future. Foldable phones are brand new, and we're still figuring out how we're going to use them. So seeing new and exciting form, factors like what we saw today from TCL really gives us an idea of what they could be used for in the future.

Source : AP Archive