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Hardware

TCL Unveils Trifold and Rollable Smartphones (betanews.com) 25

Posted by msmash from the moving-ahead dept.
A year ago, we started to see the first wave of foldable devices and they were ... disappointing. But companies are not backing down. TCL is already looking ahead with a pair of foldable and rollable prototypes that imagines what the future of phones could look like. From a report: One is a trifold variant with two hinges, while the other is even crazier -- it is rollable! Yes, TCL has designed a phone that gets larger by utilizing a flexible display that rolls and unrolls -- it looks to be quite genius, actually. "At just 9mm in thickness, this portable concept re-imagines the standard smartphone design, with a rollable AMOLED display that uses internal motors to extend the 6.75-inch screen to a 7.8-inch display size with the press of a button. This allows for an entirely new device user experience that includes split screen and multi-tasking UI enhancements customized by TCL. Thanks to a larger axis and rolled display, the device has no wrinkles or creases which are commonly found with foldable AMOLEDs. When not in use, a motor-driven sliding panel utilizes advanced mechanics to conceal the flexible display," says TCL.
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TCL Unveils Trifold and Rollable Smartphones More

TCL Unveils Trifold and Rollable Smartphones

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  • They should name their phone the TooKool.

  • Well one possibility fo a rollable phone... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) on Thursday March 05, 2020 @03:35PM (#59800496)

    I will give a million geek points to the phone vendor that builds a rollable, that when rolling up deploys lenses in the "tube" to be able to use your rolled phone as a camera with a very serious zoom (or macro).

  • So basically every one of these companies thinks that folding phones is cool, so why not be twice as cool with twice the folds?

    Reminds me of a particular story from The Onion about Gillette going from 3 to 5 blades because Schick had the audacity to have 4 blades on their new product.

    • That's my favorite article from The Onion. Still cracks me up when I read it:

      Fuck everything, we're doing five blades:
      https://www.theonion.com/fuck-... [theonion.com]

    • Reminds me of a particular story from The Onion about Gillette going from 3 to 5 blades because Schick had the audacity to have 4 blades on their new product.

      And before that was the SNL sketch [jt.org] from 1975 about the Triple-Trac razor: "The Triple-Trac. Because you’ll believe anything."

    • Phone screens have grown from the tiny 1.5" displays on the early flip phones, to 3.5" on the original iPhone, to a "massive" 5.3" on the original Galaxy Note which Jobs scoffed at because he thought it was too big, to 6.2" on the regular Galaxy S20 and 6.9" on the Galaxy S20 Ultra. This isn't a trend being driven by manufacturers trying to one-up each other on some meaningless spec. Customers are preferentially buying bigger screens, and manufacturers are doing everything they can to give it to them.

      To

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        Just buy clothes with bigger pockets, that's what I do. I'd have a 7" phone if I could get a decent one.

  • I hope the firmware is less buggy than that of my TCL TV. It's a great TV overall, and they've updated the firmware several times since I bought it, fixing some bugs, not fixing others, and introducing new ones. Random reboots, one-time reboots at startup, network fails at startup, wonky remote, etc.

  • ... rollable AMOLED display that uses internal motors to extend the 6.75-inch screen to a 7.8-inch display size with the press of a button.

    When someone hacks the phone and gets it to unroll while in your pocket and you have to cut it out ...

    Also, motors in the phone -- what could go wrong with that...

  • Foldable has never sat well with me. I see way too many issues with a crease point.

    On the other hand finally having an Earth Final Conflict Global would be friggin awesome.

    • > finally having an Earth Final Conflict Global would be friggin awesome.

      We're still ten years away on the connectivity ... but it'll happen the same way GPS got tiny and amazing.
       

    • A 'Global' was the first thing that I thought of when I saw rollable screen. Link to picture of a Global from the series. https://earthfinalconflict.fan... [fandom.com]

      • Interestingly all the pictures are of the "half out" mode. The fully collapsed mode is handy and the fully open mode was what they used for real map looking and what have you.

  • ... people will be snorting things with the roll up one.
  • I refuse to buy any of those ridiculously oversized bricks that almost all "smart phones" are today. Attaching multiple of those together makes it just worse. I'll wait until finally some company manages to build a foldable phone that is actually small when folded. And I would not mind if it had just hard planar displays which exhibit a tiny gap when unfolded.
  • The one that slides out, and rolls up I think would be better to handle the stress, than constantly folding. The only issue BOTH rolling & folding have, is that you really can't put a protective GLASS coating over them, as it would really prevent them from rolling/folding. One of these days, they will figure it out.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Khyber ( 864651 )

      We have microns-thick glass with insane bending radius. The problem would be getting it layered on the display itself.

  • I want the communication device from the TV show, Earth Final Conflict.

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