LG likely to release smartphone with flexible OLED display this year

While discussing the company’s financial results, LG announced that it will introduce a smartphone with a flexible OLED screen in the fourth quarter of the year. According to The Wall Street Journal, LG is losing sales in television due to stiff competition and apparently plans to concentrate on the mobile segment. The company has shipped 10.2 million smartphones during the first quarter of this year and expects the number to increase to 45 million by the end of the year.

LG’s VP of mobile, Yoon Bu-hyun, is said to be working closely with LG Display, in order to bring in the flexible display by the end of the year. Further details like the extent of flexibility or durability of the LG smartphone with flexible display are not yet known. However, it is quite unlikely to see a complete flexible smartphone as the required circuitry and other components are still missing.

LG to build a smartphone with a flexible display

LG has also promised that curved OLED TVs will go up on sale later this year. Consideing its falling TV market, let's wait and aee if these new TVs manage to reach the market without any delays. According to Forbes, LG’s chief technology officer Skott Ahn revealed earlier this year that the company was looking at “flexible and curved solutions” for its smartphones, which also includes a phone that curves to take the shape of a face when held to the ear. However, he had further said that it would be too early to introduce flexible screens to the market due to several technological hurdles and also durability.

While bendable displays and morphed flexible smartphone pictures have always been around, it was this year at CES that Samsung rekindled the flexible display arena by showing off a working prototype of a phone with bendable display. However, the prototype displayed wasn’t truly a phone. It lacked a radio, operating system, camera, and most of the other features that one would find in a phone. The prototype looked more like a touch-capable digital picture frame that uses a low-power processor to cycle through images of a mocked-up UI. Nokia has also been very enthusiastic about flexible displays and phones, showing several interesting prototypes in the past.