According to an analysis firm, the arrival of smartphone screens that repair scratches on their own is imminent. Be careful though, the technology won’t be miraculous either.
What’s more annoying than dropping your smartphone, picking it up and seeing with horror a beautiful crack crossing the screen from side to side. This doesn’t prevent you from using the mobile without problem fortunately, but it’s very ugly. Generally, you resign yourself to keeping the screen thus disfigured in front of the prohibitive price of replacement. What if it was soon just a distant memory? It could well be according to analysts at CCS Insight.
According to them, smartphone screens with “self-healing” capabilities would hit shelves in 5 years, in 2028. The concept is a bit of an Arlesian. Remember, in 2014, the LG G Flex offered a curved screen and a back supposed to repair itself in case of scratches. 3 years later, Apple filed a patent for a similar screen to one day equip its iPhone, iPad And Mac. According to the analysis firm, we are getting there soon: “it’s no longer science fiction, it can be done. […] The biggest challenge is setting expectations correctly.”
Self-healing mobile screens could hit the market in a few years
Technically, this would involve adding a “nano-coating” to the screen. If it is scratched, it creates a material which reacts on contact with air to fill the imperfection. CSS Insight talks about expectations in the sense that “it’s not about broken screens that miraculously turn back into [comme neuf]. These are just small cosmetic scratches”. So don’t expect to attend a regeneration worthy of Wolverine if your smartphone screen is particularly damaged.
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Once the technology is on the market, the most important thing will be to inform the consumer of what it can really do. There is no question of seeing videos popping up of Youtubers grabbing a knife to scratch the screen of the models concerned and concluding that the system does not work. That’s really not the point. We talk about correct micro-scratches alone occurring over time, even after slight shocks or a trip in the pocket too close to the keys, and that’s not bad.
Source: CNBC