Samsung Moving to UHD, Flexible Displays In Coming Years

Samsung just held its second Analyst Day event, giving journalists, analysts, and anyone who wanted to peak into their live stream a taste of what's to come from the South Korean tech giant.

Out of the seven presentations, covering pretty much all aspects of the business, the most interesting sneak peak was into the future of Samsung's display manufacturing.

Higher High Definition Display 

Samsung says it plans to manufacture the ubiquitous AMOLED display technology it uses in its smartphones with even higher resolution capabilities in 2014. Right now, the highest pixel density on a mass-produced and marketable smartphone's display is on the HTC One. It manages 469 pixels per inch. Samsung want to manufacture AMOLED panels with pixel densities up to 560ppi next year.

That would be four times the display resolution of Samsung's first AMOLEDs, and would make the new standard for displays 2560 x 1440p instead of the current 1920 x 1080p. According to Android Authority, the math between that WQHD resolution and the 560ppi works out to about a 5.25-inch screen, putting it in range of, say, a slightly larger Samsung Galaxy S5 phone.

That's not all Samsung is working on though, as it plans on making 4K the standard for its small-screen AMOLEDS by the close of 2015. Samsung is seemingly in a race with LG Electronics, which unveiled its prototype smartphone-sized 4K LCD screen earlier this year, and Ultra HD screens aren't the only thing LG and Samsung are both working on for the next few years.

Flexible, Then Bendable Displays

Samsung also plans to get more comfortable making bended displays in the next couple of years. In the past few weeks, we've seen Samsung and LG announce what basically are bent-display variants of their respective flagship smartphones, the Galaxy Note 3 and G2 in the "Galaxy Round" and "LG G Flex." While neither bent-display smartphone show any incredible advantages to having a curved smartphone, application can always trail innovation, and we might find that bendable is better once the technology is more commonplace.

In any case, such bended displays are a stepping stone towards what Samsung eventually wants to be doing starting around 2016 and beyond: "Foldable" displays. There are still lots of technological hurtles to get through on the way towards foldable display, but Samsung is betting foldable, flexible displays will be the next big thing, especially with regard to wearable computing.

It's also betting that holding approximately 1/3 of the flexible display-related patents will turn into a lucrative investment.

Other Interesting Tidbits

Samsung's marathon presentation included lots of other interesting things about the company's future direction, including confirmation of some things we thought Samsung was doing.

For one, Samsung confirmed that it's going to launch an ARM-based 64-bit Exynos system on a chip, which we've heard before, but the company also said it would also start making its own 64-bit core for its SoCs later.

The South Korean company also confirmed that it was working on 16-megapixel sensors for smartphone cameras, which we surmised previously when Samsung reportedly was moving away from dependency on Sony for its sensors and developing its own production capability.