In the world of smartphone displays, there are two technologies that the big brand rely upon to deliver a crystal clear and vivid experience, LCD and OLED. The latter has become a luxury inclusion from the likes of Samsung with their Super AMOLED displays, which make excellent use of organic LEDs to deliver vibrant displays with deep blacks and punchy colors. Both LG and Samsung know what they’re doing with OLED however, and a few years ago the two of them started battling it out for devices with new designs using flexible OLED displays. This was first the Galaxy Round and the G Flex, and while LG’s G Flex 2 released last year certainly had more of a pronounced curve in its overall look, Samsung’s Galaxy S6 Edge used the technology to create a good-looking device. If this latest patent is go on though, LG is looking to one-up Samsung in a big way.
Patently Mobile is reporting that LG has been given a design patent for a smartphone display that totally wraps around both sides of the device. The design patent outlines a standard, yet blocky, design of a smartphone with information on the display on both sides of the display. Receiving a patent for something and producing an end product are two very different things. Presumably, LG is filing such a patent to ensure that they can launch a product further down the line without Samsung getting in the way. A device like this might also be a little difficult to use as an product, software will need to determine when someone is holding the device and not activate the sides of the display, for instance.
Regardless, LG seems to be looking to Plastic OLED and Flexible OLED displays to try new things. Smartwatches like the G Watch R and Watch Urbane get such good battery life and offer a fully-circular display through their use of P-OLED, and during CES 2016 the company was able to show off a display that was able to be fully-rolled, just like a newspaper or sheet of paper. With one more patent from LG, it looks as though there are big launches from both Samsung and LG concerning flexible displays in the near future.
