Are foldable phones the next big thing? Leading phone company Huawei is the third in the industry to announce a foldable phone in 2018.
Huawei CEO Richard Yu said that the Chinese company already has a "working sample" of the device. The executive, however, clarified the foldable phone is not yet ready for launch as it still needs a more flexible screen technology and an improved mechanical design.
"We have two screens, but we still have a small gap [between the screens]. That's not good, and we should get rid of that gap," Yu said in an interview with CNET.
Huawei's announcement comes after the introduction of the ZTE Axon M. The foldable phone, which was revealed last week, combines two 5.2-inch Full High-Definition displays to make a single mini tablet-like screen. When folded back-to-back, it looks like a normal phone with a glass front and a glass back.
China's ZTE is the first company to undertake the foldable smartphone challenge, with a scheduled U.S. release this coming holiday season. It is expected to come to China and Europe in the first quarter of 2018.
Rumors of Samsung also working on a foldable phone has been getting louder in the past few months. Reports have said that the handset called Galaxy X will be ready by the end of 2017, for release in early 2018. It will potentially use a flexible organic light-emitting diode (OLED) panel that will come in a segmented design. And just like the Axon M, it is supposed to create a mini-tablet like appearance when both screens are put side by side.
Talk of a Samsung foldable smartphone has been around for six years since South Korea's Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology (SAIT) revealed that it had come up with a prototype for a foldable device. Samsung has filed for several patents for foldable devices since then.
Last January, rumors about the said device heated up again following a report from the Korea Herald. A source familiar with the matter said Samsung would "roll out more than 100,000 units of fold-out devices" in the third quarter of this year.
In September, Samsung said it is planning to launch a bendable phone in 2018.
