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1. Folding glass might save your foldable smartphone
The foldable smartphones we've seen so far have a million different talking points.
- One of the biggest is how exactly will these screens and the phone itself hold up.
- Are they something that can be carried around in our pockets and out and about like we do with a phone these days?
The crucial factor is the screen. And not just the reliability of the display, but its durability while protected by a plastic film, because of course, no glass is used.
- Both the Samsung Galaxy Fold and the Huawei Mate X use a plastic film to protect their screen, which is said to have been surprisingly difficult to prototype and produce.
- All major smartphones including Apple and Samsung nowadays use hardened glass on the front of their iPhones or Android devices, often Corning's Gorilla Glass product, to protect the display and innards.
- Durability is a big problem. The folding outwards design choice from the Samsung Galaxy Fold suggests a necessary protection of the inner foldable panel.
- Yet the Huawei Mate X throws caution to the wind, leaving the display constantly exposed to the elements, seemingly leaving the job of protection to cases.
What's this about foldable glass?
Glass can fold and you can buy glass that can fold today. But the issue is that glass is made in a way that ends up eats electronics, as Wired explains in a report on Corning's foldable glass efforts for smartphones, that appears to be coming soon:
- Wired's headline (aggressively) reads: "Want a foldable phone? Hold out for real glass," and explains that the folding plastic will crease over time, along with becoming scratched and dinged.
- That doesn't come from Corning, either, but a Motorola executive, who said plastic films have major defects.
- "The fact that you're touching [that film] with your nails is scratching it," a Motorola executive told Engadget recently. "It has a short life right away; it starts dying the day you unpack it. But it's beautiful. That first day, it's beautiful."
- Corning is working on ultra-thin bendable glass that's thinner than 0.1 millimeters, and can bend to a 5mm radius – as you can see in the GIF from Corning above.
- Glass has approximately the same problem of foldable displays: neither can fold down completely, needing to maintain a certain radius before the pinch causes problems.
- For a display, being creased leads to permanent pixel damage.
- As for glass? It's about remaining solid after a tight fold or pinch.
- "The back of the problem we're trying to break, the technical challenge, is, can you keep those tight 3- to 5-millimeter bend radii and also increase the damage resistance of the glass," said Corning's John Bayne.
- The problem is that manufacturing flexible glass currently involves hot dips into molten salts, as Corning explains, which provides strength
- But Salts in the glass would eat away electronics on touch-screen devices.
- "In a display application, you're putting transistors on the glass. Transistors hate salt: Sodium, potassium, anything from the salt family will eat away a transistor," Bayne told Wired.
- But Corning is working on the problem, providing early samples to vendors that are getting closer to meeting all technical requirements.
- The kicker? It's still at least 1-3 years away from being used in a final product, and Wired's reporting didn't get into just how tough very thin glass might be, and how it will be scratch-resistant in the same way Gorilla Glass is.
2. Here's Android Authority's Samsung Galaxy S10 Plus review (AA). David Imel writes, "I love nearly everything about the Galaxy S10 Plus, but the camera really disappointed me."
3. Also, early Galaxy S10 sales were reported as underwhelming; Samsung says those reports are wrong and that sales are up from the S9 (AA).
4. And Samsung is also working on two more foldable smartphones: clamshell and outfolding or Mate X style (Bloomberg).
5. What the tech industry thinks 5G will do for us (AA).
6. Apple has very quietly fixed the "Flexgate" issue with its 2018 MacBook Pros without admitting it exists (iFixit).
7. A leak shows what the new Chromium-based Edge from Microsoft looks like (Neowin).
8. Google tests shoppable ads in image searches (Engadget).
9. The Volvo Polestar 2 has hit Geneva with a vegan-interior and as we predicted last week, it's native Android and Google tie-in is big deal (The Verge).
10. A ketamine-based nasal spray is now an FDA-approved depression treatment (Gizmodo).
11. A Reddit thread with interesting game developer replies: "What is it like working at a company during and after the release of a negatively received game?" (r/games)
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