During this time, the Huawei Mate X5 has earned a lot of eyeballs with its excellent folding screen technology.
Although folding screen technology has been controversial, it is difficult to determine whether it is the future of mobile phone screens, but the technical content it brings cannot be ignored.
When it comes to mobile phone screen technology, the development of mobile phones is inseparable from the rapid development of screen technology.
Resistance to capacitance, VGA to 4K
The early mobile phone screens, whether they are mainstream models or copycat models that are blooming everywhere, almost all use resistive screens.
IBM Simon, a touchscreen phone launched in 1994, has no physical buttons at all, and is equipped with a stylus with pressure-sensing click technology.
The touch screen of this mobile phone is a resistive screen, which does not support multi-touch and requires hard object pressing to use, so this type of mobile phone is often equipped with a stylus.
The resistive screen is not afraid of water and oil, coupled with low cost, it is the mainstream of touch screen at the beginning of this century, but this kind of screen is prone to scratches, low light transmittance, and the key is that the touch feedback is not sensitive enough.
In 2006, LG released the LG KE850 Prada, the originator of capacitive touchscreen phones.
The capacitive touch screen uses the current induction of the human body to work, when the finger touches the metal layer, it can form a coupling capacitor, and the finger can suck a small current.
Small currents flow out of the electrodes on the four corners of the touch screen, and the controller derives the position of the touch points by accurately calculating the proportions of these four currents.
The first generation of the iPhone that really made the capacitive screen mobile phone widely recognized was a year later, and users could completely get rid of the touch pen and operate it directly with their fingers.
The application of capacitive screen is later than that of resistive screen, but due to the better touch experience, it has gradually replaced resistive screen, but in the industrial field, resistive screen is still the mainstream.
As capacitive screens become the mainstream, manufacturers have begun to work on screen resolution.
Whether it's a mobile phone or any other display screen, resolution is formed by many dots on the screen.
The delicacy of the image quality is determined by the point spacing, which is calculated by dividing the panel size by the resolution.
The smaller the dot distance, the higher the screen resolution, and the clearer and more delicate the picture quality, which is used by most ordinary users, which is a direct way to distinguish the quality of the screen.
The earliest resolutions, mostly VGAs, i.e. graphics arrays, were around 640 480, which appeared as early as 1987.
Many TVs and computer monitors in the last century used this resolution, and later it was extended to some mobile phones, such as the Nokia E71.
XGA, or Extended Graphics Array, is similar to VGA, but with a much higher resolution of 1024 768.
The world's first phone with XGA resolution was the Optimus VU from LG, and the first generation of the Galaxy Note was also in XGA resolution.
In comparison, the resolution of previous generations of iPhones is not very impressive, up to 3GS at 320 480, but thanks to the 24-bit color, it looks better than other phones.
In 2010, the iPhone 4 was released, and the resolution was upgraded to 640 960, and the pixels were no longer visible to the naked eye, and the display effect was stunning.
Android phones have also entered the HD era, with the first 720p resolution phone being Samsung's Galaxy Nexus and the first 1080p phone being the original HTC Butterfly.
The first 2K resolution phone was LG's G3, and in 2015, Sony released the first 4K resolution phone, the Xperia Z5.
The development of screen resolution is fast, but it has also generated a lot of debate, and most users have difficulty distinguishing between 4K and 2K, especially on mobile phone products.
Moreover, the power consumption brought by high resolution was unbearable for the chips of that year, and both G3 and Xperia Z5 have had problems such as serious heating and even screen burn-in.
In the future, the screen technology began to shift, no longer simply stacking resolution, until now, the resolution of flagship mobile phones, mostly between 2K and 4K.
Low to high brush, LCD to OLED
Although manufacturers no longer roll resolution, but the rivers and lakes that do not roll do not exist, they have changed to volume screen refresh rate.
The mobile phone screen refresh rate refers to the number of frames displayed by the mobile phone per second, and usually the mobile phone screen will be refreshed 60 times per second, which is 60 Hz, to appear smooth.
On the premise that the frame rate is high enough, the more frames per second are displayed, the picture will look more coherent, there will be no feeling of stuttering, and the visual experience will be significantly improved.
Before 2010, mobile phone screen refresh rates were mostly 30 hertz, and it wasn't until 2010 that the iPhone 4 achieved a refresh rate of 60 hertz.
Since then, 60 hertz has become the "standard" on mobile phone screens, and has been used by all mainstream mobile phones without much change.
In 2015, the first phone to support high brushing, the Sharp Aquos R, was officially launched, and it featured a screen that supported a 120Hz refresh rate.
But the phone didn't make a difference until May 2019, when the OnePlus 7 Pro succeeded in driving the high-brush boom with a 90Hz high refresh rate screen.
So Android manufacturers all ran to roll up the high brush screen, and now, almost all mobile phones have high brush function, even if it is a low-end machine with hundreds of yuan, the screen can be up to 90 Hz.
The only exception is the iPhone, even if the ** reaches the standard version of six or seven thousand, it still insists on 60 hertz unwaveringly, which has also caused countless consumers to criticize.
The reason why the high brush can be significantly improved is because most of the current mobile phones have changed from LCD screens to OLED screens, and the high brush effect of OLED screens is better.
For a long time, the competition between LCD and OLED has not stopped, and there has always been a saying that "LCD will never be a slave".
In the early days of mobile phones, the color screens used LCD screens, which are common liquid crystal display screens.
LCD cannot emit light on its own, and requires the help of an additional light source to emit light, but with the advantages of high color reproduction and mature technology, it has become the standard configuration of early smartphones.
However, the LCD screen is prone to light leakage, because the internal backlight layer cannot be removed, and the display effect of the picture is always not beautiful enough.
In contrast, OLED display technology has the characteristics of self-illumination, which is not prone to light leakage, and the display effect is also better.
Moreover, because of the characteristics of the screen, OLED is easier to bend and easy to encapsulate, which is the biggest benefit for full-screen mobile phones.
Nokia launched the first N85 in 2008, but it was Samsung that really promoted OLEDs.
In 2014, Samsung released its first flagship, the Galaxy Note 4, which not only features a 2K resolution screen, but also uses its own AMOLED technology.
OLED, which has been suppressed by LCD, has begun its counterattack, with its market share rising and its technology improving.
In 2017, Apple, which has always been loyal to LCDs, released the iPhone X with an unprecedented OLED screen.
This basically announced the end of LCD, after which the number of phones with LCD screens decreased dramatically, and OLED was close to dominating the world.
Now, the competition of mobile phone screens has developed to the folding screen, and the debate about the folding screen is still very large, so I won't go into details.
The development of mobile phones is inseparable from the development of screens, and the improvement of screen technology can bring users the most intuitive experience.
What new technologies will be introduced into the mobile phone screen in the future?
References:
Dig deeper: The history of mobile phone screens.
Tianji.com: The history of the evolution of mobile phone screens.
Internet**. Edit:Chen Zhanxiang.