Electronic devices namely smartphones or TVs have been the spotlight technologies. Around September every year, we are looking for a faster, lighter and a possible larger iPhone. At the same time, it seems not very satisfied for many of us, and we kind of hope for our ideal “smartphone” to come. The transparent screen smartphone used by Tony Stark that can control surrounding environments in the Iron Man or the transparent display mirror that used to track the villain’s location by Ethan Hunt in the Mission Impossible movies feels like years away from reality. The question is that in real life will they be really cool as we have seen in the movies or will they be awful and inconvenient for the users?
Those dreamers will say “Yeah, of course. I would love to work on a clear screen” or the critics will say “Aren’t finding your phone hard enough for you these days?”
Whatever those answers are, when you ask a room full of people if they want to have a clear screen smartphone, I bet their answer would be “Of course, I want one!” The world biggest electronics and tech companies like Apple, Samsung, Sony or even Google are producing their own phones, but who is going to be the first company that takes a leap of faith and launches its first transparent phones.
Samsung has been one of the leading companies that trying to bring this transparent screen into the market. Since 2005, Samsung has been exhibiting prototype of transparent TVs, but in 2016 TechRadar reported that Samsung chose to stopped producing these transparent TV screens. The reason was because “Everyone thinks that it’s cool, but no one was actually buying one”.
Why nobody wants it? What are the obstacles that preclude our childhood dream transparent smartphones from happening?
A major factor that makes transparent TVs possible is because the availability of power source, TVs are attached to its power source all the time which make it possible to display high-resolution images at any brightness level. And thanks to the OLED technology, we are no longer require a blacklight anymore. On the other hand, smartphones are battery-powered devices and those batteries take up to 50% of the physical space of the smartphone, and not to mention where to put all the camera, sensors or the way to utilize black and white light in the background and displaying those colors on the translucent screen would, of course, leads to more power consumption. The more important issue is privacy. Do we want other people behind our screen to see what we are doing?
Even though there have been many criticisms about why transparent displays are not good for smartphones, I can still see the undercurrent of major companies like LG, Panasonic and Samsung are competing and want to be the first to bring these technologies into the market (In late 2018, Samsung filed patents related to transparent screens). From an economic point of view, the statistic shows that more than 2.5 billion people now are using smartphones, and 90% of those population ages among 18–44-year-olds which are teenagers, working men and women, and businessman who have buying power. If this new technology can capture only 10% of these people, it would create a huge impact on the industry and might bring us back the experience where Apple released the first iPhone.
I would say that transparent screens definitely have a sparkling future and the future is now.
The reason is not that those screens are just cool, but the engineering advancements of microprocessors, sensors, OLED panels, and even communication modules has been exponentially improved and will eventually bring these translucent screens to the public.
