“Future versions of Apple’s iPhone, the definitive mobile device credited for taking the Internet beyond the personal computer, might bend and twist,” Kim Yoo-chul reports for The Korea Times. “At least that seemed to be what Samsung Electronics Vice Chairman Kwon Oh-hyun was hinting at when he revealed that the company is getting ‘huge’ orders from electronics makers for it futuristic lineup of flexible organic light emitting diode (OLED) displays.”
Kim reports, “Samsung, which enjoys a dual strength in parts and finished products, has found Apple to be an odd bedfellow, as one of its biggest customers for screens and memory chips but also a hated foe in smartphones and touch-screen tablets.”
MacDailyNews Take: Yes, Samsung “hates” Apple because the Cupertino Colossus keep producing a never-ending stream of things that Samsung feels compelled to knock off. So much work infringing all of that IP! Plus, they “hate” Apple because Apple keeps paying them billions upon billions of dollars for components every year. Bad Apple!
Kim reports, “The notoriously secretive Apple remains tight lipped about how its future iPhones will look and it’s hard to imagine that its next smartphone, which may or may not be named the iPhone 5, having a rubbery screen.”
MacDailyNews Take: Yeah, um, we hereby guarantee it won’t be called the “iPhone 5.”
Kim reports, “But for iPhones after that, who knows? While Kwon didn’t give out any names, industry sources here believe that Apple is likely to beone [sic] of the handset makers asking Samsung to provide them flexible screens. This makes it hard to rule out the possibility that an iPhone ‘Yoga’ could appear sometine in the future, they said.”
“A Samsung spokesman declined to talk in detail about the plans for flexible OLED screens and how Apple fits into the picture,” Kim reports. “However, another industry official said that Samsung wouldn’t be this bullish about flexible OLED screens if Apple wasn’t sharing its enthusiasm. ‘Apple is the iconic company in the industry that will continue to set the trends. If Samsung finds increasing industry demand for a futuristic product like flexible displays, it’s hard to imagine Apple doesn’t have something to do with it,’ said an analyst from a U.S.-based investment bank.”
Read more in the full article here.
