Flexible displays have been hyped as the future of cell phones and mobile technology for the past several years.
One reason is cost, says Abhigyan Sengupta, an analyst with consultancy firm MarketsAndMarkets, which recently published a global study on flexible displays.
To keep the company focused on perfecting the ink for its flexible displays for handheld gadgets, Wilcox backed out of other time-consuming exploratory projects.
Technologies such as electronic ink, 3D controllers, flexible displays, voice recognition and solid-state mass storage are rapidly approaching mass market commercialization price points.
Even so, it would seem that full colour, fully flexible displays that can switch fast enough to show video are still some way off.
The problem with flexible displays is not so much the screen but the drive electronics that switch the individual polymer pixels on and off.
As Apple does not invent or develop flexible displays it is intuitively difficult to see where the invention in its flexible wrap around device actually lies.
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According to Korean news site etnews, technology that Samsung bought to help protect flexible displays from moisture and air damage is bogging down its manufacturing process.
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Initially, the idea was to use plastic flexible displays (as evidenced by previous XO 3.0 renders), but degradation caused by the sun's UV rays and plastic's easily scratched surface forced the company to switch gears and use glass instead.
The team of Professor Keon Jae Lee from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, KAIST has developed a high performance flexible all-solid-state battery, an essential energy source for flexible displays (see paper in Nano Letters: "Bendable Inorganic Thin-Film Battery for Fully Flexible Electronic Systems").
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The same applies to the recent Apple patent for a wrap around display on an electronic device, which specifically relates to flexible AMOLED displays.
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Peruvemba expects flexible plastic displays to get larger in coming years, to the point that they can be used in e-book readers and laptop computers.
More than 20 million flexible plastic displays are on the market today, according to Sriram Peruvemba, vice-president of marketing for E Ink, the company that developed the low-power display technology for the Amazon Kindle and many other e-book readers.
They need urgently to get momentum behind Glass before the new generation of flexible, unbreakable displays transforms the smartphone sector.
"There are about 30 million flexible e-ink displays in the field today - the oldest working ones are from 2006, " says Sri Peruvemba of E-Ink.
Although Mr Peruvemba says his firm has started manufacturing displays with flexible backplanes in-house, its many partners are also busy researching ways to make electronic paper as flexible as the real thing.
Meanwhile, E-Ink, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is attempting to create flexible, paper-like displays using inks that are electronically addressable.
The performance of LIBs has not been sufficient either, thereby difficult to apply to flexible consumer electronics including rollable displays.
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This technology produces displays that are flexible and bendable.
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Flexible electronics will allow circuits, displays and solar captors to be integrated anywhere in the battle suit, including in the soldier's mask, as a transparent display.
Don't expect a full-fledged version of Morph, which combines flexible electronics, touch-sensitive textured displays and the ability to process sensory information all in one phone.
The company is also creating an ultra slim flexible glass which will drive improvements in high performance displays.
Among them is South Korean firm LG Displays, which has just begun mass-producing fully flexible e-ink screens.
And as much as Tim Cook has said he does not like AMOLED displays, that might indeed be the best material for these flexible, low-energy screens.
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