CES: Samsung Shows Off Folding Displays and Eco-Friendly LCD Technology

Samsung debuted several impressive new technologies today at their CES Keynote this morning, including flexible OLED displays, new high-end processors for mobile devices and energy saving solid-state hard drives (SSDs) and tablet displays. They also showcased their humanitarian efforts around the globe with a visit from President Bill Clinton.

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Samsung's flexible OLED displays are made with a thin plastic film in place of glass, and will be branded Youm. The displays are apparently more resistant to breaking, in addition to opening up new design possibilties. Executives showed off several displays both in and out of devices, including a cellphone that can fold open to be used as a tablet and a wraparound display that allows text to be displayed on a cellphone's edges.  

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“This new form factor will really begin to change how people interact with their devices," said Brian Berkeley, Senior Vice President of Samsung Displays. He went on to discuss how these devices open up "new lifestyle possibilities ... [and] allow our partners to create a whole new ecosystem of devices.”

Samsung also showed off its Green LCD technology, a 10.1 inch tablet display that Samsung says requires 25% less power to operate. Keeping with the green theme, the company underlined the power savings that are possible when data centers switch to SSDs (a category Samsung leads in) from spinning hard drives.

Samsung also debuted Exynos 5 Octa, a new chipset for high-end smartphones and tablets. Exynos 5 Octa consists of two sets of four processor cores each, which promises to improve multitasking and 3D graphics processing. The company showed an impressive demo of EA's processor-intensive Need For Speed driving game running on a tablet. In addition to improved performance, the chips will enjoy greater power efficiency thanks to their use of the big.LITTLE architecture, which shunts low power tasks to more efficient processors and leaves more power-hungry ones dark until they are needed for high-power applications such as gaming or graphics processing.

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Finally, Samsung hosted President Clinton on their stage to discuss their Help For Children campaign. Samsung President Stephen Woo says the program aims to "provide a technology-rich education for 2.5 million students over the next 5 years."

Clinton is Samsung's Help For Children Ambassador, and began his remarks by noting that he has "always been fascinated by the role of technology and human history." The former President spoke on a variety of topics, including the three most crucial problems he sees the world facing (lack of access, inequality and climate change) and the ways technology can improve people's lives, especially in the third world, citing fishermen in Sri Lanka who used cellphones to increase their productivity by 30% and cellphone banking in Haiti that helped people as their country's infrastructure crumbled. Clinton said he believes the virtual world allows people to come together to have important conversations about the challenges we face.