Want a Foldable Phone? Hold Out for Real Glass

At least, not yet.“Glass today, the current choices out there, they’re not optimal” for folding smartphones, says John Bayne, who heads up glass giant Corning’s Gorilla Glass business. Which makes sense in that the materials can not only bend as far as you’d need, they can do so repeatedly; Samsung claims its so-called Infinity Flex Display can withstand hundreds of thousands of openings and closings.Get a closer look at Samsung's futuristic, bendy Galaxy Fold smartphone.“The polymer is better at flexibility; it’s easier to bend at the same thickness,” says John Mauro, a professor of materials science and engineering at Penn State University who had previously spent 18 years at Corning.But plastic is also, as you may by now have guessed, worse at all kinds of things. The trick, though, is achieving that kind of pinch without losing the toughness that makes glass great to begin with.“The back of the problem we’re trying to break, the technical challenge, is can you keep those tight 3-5mm bend radii and also increase the damage resistance of the glass,” says Bayne. We can give them one or the other; the key is to give them both.”Bayne expects foldable glass to be ready by the time foldable smartphones go mainstream, say a couple of years.