Xiaomi is, without a doubt, one of the largest smartphone manufacturers in China, even though the company is no longer in the top 3 smartphone companies in their homeland, at least not in terms of sheer sales, a number of companies managed to outsell Xiaomi in the first half of this year, including Huawei, OPPO and Vivo. That being said, Xiaomi is expected to announce the Mi Note 2 flagship phablet in October or November, and as we’re waiting for that to happen, something really, really interesting leaked in China, read on.
If you take a look at the two images in the gallery down below, you’ll get to see Xiaomi’s concept flexible display for smartphones, or at least it looks like it. Now, these two images leaked on Baidu, and they seems to show off a flexible display which belongs on a smartphone, even though the source claims this is a concept smartphone, which seems quite unlikely considering we see only a displays here, as there are no bezels or buttons here, and this flexible layer is extremely thin. Now, chances are that this is a prototype unit, or perhaps a non-functioning, digitally enhanced representation of what’s to come. In any case, it seems like this display is bendable in pretty much every direction, and it does remind us of Lenovo’s technology which was demoed at IFA 2016 back in September.
Now, we’ve seen such flexible displays demoed in the past, and the aforementioned Lenovo tech is a good example. Needless to say, Samsung had already submitted a number of patents for flexible smartphones, and we do expect such devices to become a reality at some point in the future, but such smartphones might not become a reality as soon as we expect them to. Such technology is still quite expensive, and the flexible displays are not the only problem here, if the display is bending, then the whole phone needs to bend, which means that the internals have to bend as well, or at least be positioned properly to allow the phone to bend to a certain degree. It will be interesting to see who will be first to cross the finish line and actually release such a device to the market.
