Folding Foldables
Foldable devices are here, at least according to Samsung Display, Samsung Electronics, a number of other smartphone brands, and potentially ‘a large consumer electronics company’ sometime in 2023, but while all sorts of metrics are tossed about concerning the durability of foldables, who sits and opens and closes a potential foldable 200,000 times to test such statistics? Is there a factory worker sitting at a desk, smoking Lucky’s and opening and closing a device each second? That can’t be because it would take such a tester 6.94 days working 8 hours a day to hit the 200,000 mark, but we know who can.
Samsung, LG, Apple, and BOE also know because they have purchased equipment for just that purpose from a South Korean company Flexigo (pvt), that has developed two tools known as ‘Foldy’ and ‘Rolly’ that replace that cigarette smoking worker, and that same company just announced another tool for testing sliding foldable displays, with the name (you guessed it…) ‘slidy’. The company, which is backed by the venture arm of Korean tool vendor Wonik (240810.KS), is expected to generate $8m - $9m in sales next year, $85m in 2024, and $170m in 2026 when the company expects to go public. “Twisty’ and ‘Stretchy’, two new tools expected next year will help to meet those lofty goals.
These tools are of extreme value to foldable brands and can not only test potential devices before consumers get their hands on them, but are instrumental in establishing standards for foldables, as many such longer-lasting tests of consumer devices are done through extrapolation, rather than full testing. In fact when the original Samsung Galaxy Fold was tested, the results showed that the device worked normally through 265,741 folds, but the flexible PCB and the associated chips were the components first to develop problems, not the display or the TFT layer, and while the device was successfully folded over 260,000 times, brightness abnormalities began to show at 160,000 folds, despite the fact that there were no defects in the display itself.
Surveys on smartphone usage vary considerably, with age group rankings ranging from 18x/day for the ‘silent’ generation to 63x/day for millennials, to 79x/day for Gen X, but an Asurion (pvt) survey (they provide smartphone damage insurance) showed that the average American checked their phone (11/2019) 96 times/day, up 20% from the same survey done two years before, and while that seems like a staggering amount, the math says a foldable with a lifetime of 200,000 folds should last 5.7 years, which is more than twice the average life of a smartphone (2.5 yrs.), unless ‘foldy’ says otherwise..
These tools are of extreme value to foldable brands and can not only test potential devices before consumers get their hands on them, but are instrumental in establishing standards for foldables, as many such longer-lasting tests of consumer devices are done through extrapolation, rather than full testing. In fact when the original Samsung Galaxy Fold was tested, the results showed that the device worked normally through 265,741 folds, but the flexible PCB and the associated chips were the components first to develop problems, not the display or the TFT layer, and while the device was successfully folded over 260,000 times, brightness abnormalities began to show at 160,000 folds, despite the fact that there were no defects in the display itself.
Surveys on smartphone usage vary considerably, with age group rankings ranging from 18x/day for the ‘silent’ generation to 63x/day for millennials, to 79x/day for Gen X, but an Asurion (pvt) survey (they provide smartphone damage insurance) showed that the average American checked their phone (11/2019) 96 times/day, up 20% from the same survey done two years before, and while that seems like a staggering amount, the math says a foldable with a lifetime of 200,000 folds should last 5.7 years, which is more than twice the average life of a smartphone (2.5 yrs.), unless ‘foldy’ says otherwise..
'Rolly" - Source: Flexigo
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