We’ve seen Motorola show off rollable phone concepts and raise its game with foldable phones in recent years. But this time around it’s come out with one that bends.
The Lenovo-owned brand has created a concept phone display that can literally wrap around your wrist. The device, which Motorola unveiled on Tuesday and which it refers to as an adaptive display, is designed to showcase future phone possibilities allowed by a flexible screen. The company says the screen can be “bent and shaped into different forms” depending on what you want.
Video calls is one way Motorola imagines you can use its new concept display when its been adjusted to an upright position.
When laid flat, its 6.9-inch screen can be used just like a standard phone with a full Android experience. From there, it can be adjusted to various stand modes. In the upright position, for instance, it offers a “more compact form of full Android” since it’s running on a 4.6-inch display. Motorola envisions people using the device for video calls in the upright position. Alternatively, Motorola says you can wrap the device around your wrist to mimic the experience of the Razr Plus’s cover screen.
This is the tent position.
Motorola isn’t the first to unveil a bendable or flexible concept phone. In fact, CNET Senior Editors, Andrew Lanxon and David Lumb each got hands-on time with Motorola’s Rizr rollable-screen concept phone as well as Samsung’s foldable display concepts from CES 2023 and CES 2022. The idea of a flexible screen you can wear on your wrist might date as far back as 2016, if not earlier. And the idea of bendable displays has been around since the 1960s, when the first flexible solar cell arrays appeared.
CNET tries on Lenovo’s bendy CPlus concept phone in 2016.
However, perhaps a flexible display makes more sense now than it did several years ago, as major phone companies such as Samsung, OnePlus, Oppo and Motorola prove they can successfully release polished foldable phone products. Even the retro flip phone appears to be staging a comeback into the mainstream.
That said, don’t expect a phone with a bendable display like the one Motorola just showed off to appear in stores anytime soon. This is more of an experiment. Companies tend to go slowly and cautiously with radical new designs. Given some of the hurdles foldable phones are facing, such as durability and price, it might be a while before that happens — if it happens at all.
