Eye-Popping Smartphone Screens of the Future ~ Hard and Software Plus

Retina displays are so yesterday. Here's some smartphone display tech that will knock your socks off.

Sharp's Display in the HTC One

Remember when Apple's Retina displays were the next big thing? Now it seems everyone has them - or something better. Whether it be a text message from a friend or just a version of Draw Something, the customer's eye is always attracted to the bright and beautiful - and smartphone makers have quickly learned that a sharp, vibrant display can sell millions of smartphones.

Unfortunately, the smartphone market is a cutthroat, Darwinian environment where what's hot today can quickly seem like an anachronism from yesterday. (See Razr, Motorola). While phone manufacturers can align their entire brand around their displays, a strategy successfully employed by Samsung and Apple, lower-tier vendors have to pick and choose how they source their displays, leaving a few flagship "hero" phones with eye-popping screens, but with others feeling decidedly average.

When smartphone designers try to nail down the features of a next-generation phone, the most obvious axis of improvement is the display resolution, in a bid to simply "out-pop" the competition. But smartphone makers are also exploring flexible displays and trying to minimize power in a bid to conserve battery drain and maximize talk time and Web surfing.

The battery life of phones can be one of the hidden costs of owning a phones with a bright, beautiful display - all those pixels, especially using a traditional LCD, will require more power than a conventional, lower-resolution screen. Organic LEDs, which can actually turn off to conserve power, seem to be the way forward, replacing the traditional LCD backlight. However, they're also expensive to manufacture, and for now, there are concerns with the longevity of the material itself.

For now, 3D mobile displays seem to be a gimmick that never quite took off; ditto for phone-mounted pico projectors, which can project an image upon the screen. The next trend of dubious value may end up being flexibility, for screens that can bend around your wrist or to enable new form factors. And you know, you may even get both.

One thing is for sure: each new display innovation will be substantially marketed, hyped, and dissected by the analyst and media community. And any success will be immediately copied by competitors.

Samsung Youm

At the Consumer Electronics Show this year, Samsung showed off its Youm flexible display. Based on OLED technology, Youm is just a prototype at the moment. Samsung also showed off a fixed, but curved HDTV display.

Plastic Logic

Plastic Logic teamed up with Intel and the Human Media Lab at Queen's University in Canada to develop several flexible concept designs, like a real-time wristwatch, a companion e-paper accessory for smartphones, and the PaperTab, a flexible tablet. "Plastic Logic's revolutionary flexible plastic displays enable innovative design approaches, which were previously impossible when using standard glass-based display technology," Steve Marsh, vice president of sales for Plastic Logic, said in a statement.

Sharp's Display in the HTC One

The Sharp display used by the HTC One takes the resolution of the Surface Pro, or 1,920-by-1,080 pixels in a 10.6-inch panel, and packs the same resolution into a 4.7-inch display. Forget about Apple's Retina display - what the One does is simply amazing. That's 468 pixels per inch, blowing away the 326 ppi used by the Apple iPhone 5.

Samsung Galaxy S 4

The new Galaxy S 4 smartphone from Samsung includes "Air Gestures," allowing the user to "swipe" the screen without actually touching it.

LG's Flexible OLED

LG said recently that it will introduce a smartphone with a flexible OLED screen in the fourth quarter of this year, according to the Wall Street

Kyocera Organic

Kyocera's Organic design is basically a curved glass screen. And not just a little curvy, like the Nexus S. We're talking full-on, angled to the contours of your hands and face curves.

Kyocera Infinito

Kyocera's Infinito design is a display that wraps longitudinally around the front and back of the handset, creating a frameless display.

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