Today is the start of the Samsung Developer Conference 2018, and to hype the event, Samsung revealed a bit about its upcoming smartphone with a foldable display. After a lot of talk about Bixby and Samsung’s Android Pie update, the company cut the lights and showed off a folding smartphone veiled in darkness and hidden in a case. It wasn’t a full device announcement, but we’re still able to glean some information from Samsung’s tease.
Samsung is calling this hardware the “Infinity Flex Display,” and it will come as part of the company’s first foldable smartphone. As you would expect from Samsung, the display is still OLED. The cover is no longer glass, of course, because glass isn’t flexible. Samsung says it developed “an advanced composite polymer”—plastic—to cover the display instead. That plus a new flexible adhesive that bonds the display cover together allows the display to be folded “hundreds of thousands of times” without degrading, according to Samsung. The company even said it was developing “rollable” and “stretchable” displays for the future.