A visitor looks at Samsung Display's rollable display at the K-Display 2023 exhibition at Coex in Gangnam District, southern Seoul, on Aug. 16, 2023.
NEWS1Samsung still dominates the foldable market, but price-cutting Chinese manufacturers and Apple, with its famously loyal user base, are working tirelessly to catch up in the race.
While Samsung Electronics declined to comment on GalaxyClub’s report, an executive confirmed that a rollable line is in the pipeline.
Samsung and China’s Huawei originally dominated the foldable market, but Apple will make its entrance with its own foldable next month.
The new rollable form factor could become a reason that Samsung maintains its dominant market share — if it succeeds.
A visitor looks at Samsung Display's rollable display at the K-Display 2023 exhibition at Coex in Gangnam District, southern Seoul, on Aug. 16, 2023. NEWS1
Samsung still dominates the foldable market, but price-cutting Chinese manufacturers and Apple, with its famously loyal user base, are working tirelessly to catch up in the race.
A wider Galaxy Z Fold 8 has just been released, but Samsung barely has time to catch its breath. It is now working on a new-generation form factor: an expandable screen that it is dubbing a “rollable” display, aiming to widen the gap with foreign makers such as Apple and Huawei.
Samsung still dominates the foldable market that it pioneered seven years ago, but price-cutting Chinese manufacturers — and soon Apple, with its famously loyal user base — are working tirelessly to catch up in the race for share.
Dutch tech outlet GalaxyClub added a rollable lineup to Samsung’s product pipeline for next year, which includes four other foldable variants — the Z Flip 9, Z Fold 9, Z Fold 9 Ultra and TriFold 2.
While Samsung Electronics declined to comment on GalaxyClub’s report, an executive confirmed that a rollable line is in the pipeline.
“It’s going to take a while, but we are planning on [the rollable’s] commercialization,” Moon Sung-hoon, the executive vice president in charge of the hardware, mobile experience division at Samsung Electronics, said at the latest Galaxy Unpacked event briefing in London.
For years, several reports have been made about this development, but most of it remains speculation. A Samsung Electronics spokesperson, however, told the Korea JoongAng Daily that the rollable phone is “under development, but no target date has been set for its release.”
The timeline may be uncertain, but the new form factor is coming nevertheless. Here is a compiled list of clues gleaned from online sleuthing.
The Rollable Flex that Samsung Display unveiled at Display Week 2023, hosted by the Society for Information Display in Los Angeles in May 2023 SAMSUNG DISPLAY
What to expect for the rollable
Samsung filed a patent for the new form factor in June 2023, which shows a Samsung device expanding sideways, according to a report from WearView. An interesting point of the phone is that its camera is placed on the moving side of the body as the display rolls out, rather than placing the bulky component behind the flexible display. When the device closes, the camera module is fitted into a cutout in the frame.
This could resolve the thickness issue seen in some of its prior foldables, which still felt chunky when closed.
Some of the other leaks said that the phone will feature a 10-inch organic light-emitting diode (OLED) panel with a 16:9 aspect ratio and 440 ppi pixel density.
This is not the first time that a Korean manufacturer has tried to bring such a form factor to life. LG Electronics, before it exited the smartphone business in 2021 due to mounting losses, had been developing a similar device that would have been the world’s first rollable phone. Leaked images of the handset show that the cameras are placed vertically on the device’s stationary side.
The concept of the world's first rollable phone, under development by LG Electronics, was introduced at CES 2021 in Los Angeles in January 2021. LG ELECTRONICS
The unreleased phone resold for millions of won on Korean secondhand marketplaces for curious tech lovers after hundreds of prototypes were distributed to some executives and developers as mementos.
Samsung Electronics Executive Chairman Lee Jae-yong, left, holds a device speculated to be the prototype of a rollable phone at the company's research center in southern Seoul in November 2020. SCREEN CAPTURE
Samsung has been developing the product for some time now as well. In November 2020, Samsung Electronics Executive Chair Lee Jae-yong was spotted holding a silver device, strongly speculated to be the next-generation phone, at the company’s research center in southern Seoul. The photos show a researcher standing next to him and miming how the phone could expand.
Samsung’s display unit has already showcased several slidable and rollable concepts over the years, including the Flex Hybrid, a foldable-slidable hybrid that can expand its screen from 10.5 inches to 12.4 inches, and the Rollable Flex, a scroll-like display that can expand to five times its original size.
Samsung Display also has experience mass-producing a rollable OLED panel, although it was for a laptop, and supplied the world’s first rollable OLED panel for Lenovo’s ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable, which can switch from a 14-inch horizontal display to a 16.7-inch vertical display at the press of a button.
In other words, no expandable phone has yet made it to market. Rumors have circulated for years that Chinese companies such as Huawei, Oppo, Tecno and Vivo have filed related technology patents and were planning commercial releases, but none have materialized. Tecno unveiled its Phantom Ultimate concept phone in 2023, showcasing a rollable display that expands from 6.55 inches to 7.11 inches in about a second via a single motor mechanism, but it has remained just a concept.
Why isn’t Samsung stopping?
Samsung and China’s Huawei originally dominated the foldable market, but Apple will make its entrance with its own foldable next month. Samsung initially held a 40 percent market share, followed by Huawei’s 30 percent, according to market tracker Counterpoint Research. But from 2026, Samsung’s share is expected to shrink to 32 percent, with Apple taking 25 percent of the share from the two incumbents, followed by Huawei’s 24 percent.
A Samsung Display employee unfolds the Rollable Flex presented at Display Week 2023, hosted by the Society for Information Display in Los Angeles in May 2023. SAMSUNG DISPLAY
“2026 will mark a new phase for the foldable smartphone market,” said Liz Lee, an associate director at Counterpoint Research. “Apple’s entry is expected to lift overall consumer awareness and raise the benchmark for premium foldables, but Samsung still has a clear advantage in product maturity, channel reach and foldable user experience.”
Conscious of Apple’s entry, Samsung chose to keep the price hike for its new wider variant to a minimum. The Z Fold 8 starts at $1,899 for the base standard model, and the higher-tier Fold 8 Ultra starts at $2,099. Apple’s foldable is expected to start somewhere between $2,000 and $2,399. The U.S. manufacturer is reportedly already developing follow-up foldable iPhones.
With another strong competitor entering the market and component costs rising due to the AI-driven memory crunch, Samsung has no time to rest if it wants to keep its top position. Technology has matured; there are almost no eye-popping features that can be added to a phone’s hardware despite continuing software enhancements, including new AI features. Smartphones have become more than simple communication tools, but makers still need a good reason to raise prices for products that are now almost as expensive as laptops. The new rollable form factor could become a reason that Samsung maintains its dominant market share — if it succeeds.
BY LEE JAE-LIM [[email protected]]
