Samsung’s new Flex Hybrid mobile display both folds and slides

Korean tech powerhouse Samsung has offered a sneak peak of a foldable and slide-able phone screen ahead of CES 2023.

Tech giant Samsung has given a sneak peak of one of the no doubt extremely large selection of new prototype and market ready kit it will be showing off at CES this week in the form of the Flex Hybrid – a mobile which has an OLED screen that can both fold and slide out to create a larger screen space.

The foldable technology bit is on the left side of the screen and slide-able bit on the right side of the Flex Hybrid. The example of why you might want this seems to be around media consumption primarily – when viewing video on the go you can fold and extend the thing out and gawp at a 10.5-inch display in aspect ratio of 4:3 or at a 12.4-inch screen in 16:10 screen ratio.

The OLED screen further bolsters the props of this device as a thing to watch video on – but the experience of watching Avengers 5 on a mobile regardless of some extensions as opposed to a nice big TV (a ton of which Samsung is also going to be flogging at CES) would presumably remain sub-optimal. But there may be more to see when the device is properly shown off tomorrow.

There’s not much more on the tech specs at this stage but going by the opening salvos of announcements Samsung has started firing out ahead of CES’s official opening, it is applying this screen technology to other product areas as well, such as laptops.

With a few novelty exceptions, the default smartphone form factor has been pretty much the same since Apple popularised the touchscreen in 2007 with the first iPhone in – a black rectangle. There have been component updates on the inside and on the operating systems of course, but the consumer choice in what the thing looks likes has been basically down to what size screen you want buy.

Previous attempts to do something different haven’t really taken off to a significant degree – and it may be that for a mobile computing device this is what we have settled on for the foreseeable future. After all, we don’t expect manufacturers to reinvent the basic laptop design at every CES, and that’s been standard for much longer.

On the other hand, it only takes one firm to get something innovative right in a way that people desire and genuinely provides more functionality, and it could change the status quo.

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