google-site-verification=rELuVVyS5Y8o0Ezst8ITY3su3PIT5khzDgo-anRp4o8 The Evolution of Mobile Screens: From Black and White to Full Video ~ Tech Senser - Technology and General Guide

2 Dec 2012

The Evolution of Mobile Screens: From Black and White to Full Video

Evolution of Mobile Screens
If you remember your phone from the turn of the millennium, you may remember playing snake, sending text messages using predictive text for the first time and the inevitable fade over time.

It’s hard to remember how we lived without the high definition, full color video enabled screens that are the norm these days. With flexible companion screens on the horizon, the world of the mobile screen is likely to change as much again in the next 12 years. The evolution of the mobile telephone is something covered in depth everywhere but the screens are something that could still be in for a radical overhaul in the near future.

Organic electronics allows screens to be produced that do not require any backlights and use a tiny fraction of the power modern LCD and AMOLED screens do. So where have we come from and where are we going to?

A Journey Through Time and Space

One of the most popular phones from the tail end of the 1990’s was the Nokia 3210. This phone had a monochrome graphic display that could display up to 5 lines of text. At its time, this was the most popular type of screen in a phone and was complimented with a green backlight. Nokia’s first colour screened phone was the 3510i, which boasted a Colour Super-twisted nematic display, a form of LCD that has been superseded by todays TFT-LCDs.

It could display 96 by 65 pixels. These are a long way from the high definition of today but the phones of this era only offered the ability to text and talk and sometimes WAP (remember that) internet. With the release of the iPhone in 2007, the world of the mobile phone was changed forever, as the screen became a touch sensitive display with a large pixel count.

Since then, displays have changed a lot, with Apple’s retina display promising that there are enough pixels per inch so that each one cannot be discerned by the naked eye. These screens have more pixels per inch than the old phones, from the early 2000s, had in their entire screen. One big change that has happened with mobile phones, however, is the nosedive in battery life. Thanks to the massive power hungry screens, most users find themselves charging their device every night. This is where organic electronics could come in.

Organic electronic displays are built using carbon based small molecules and polymers. As they also reflect light from outside, they use a fraction of the power that traditional LCD and AMOLED screens use. Combined with their extra flexibility, these screens seem like a real step forward in display technology.

So, from inorganic monochrome displays that required backlighting all the way to the potential screens of the future: organic, flexible and virtually indestructible; display technology for mobile devices has come a long way in the last 12 years and it’s looking likely to continue apace in the next 12.

Roxanne Depp

About the Guest Author:

Roxanne Depp is interested in everything related to tech. If she is not working or writing she spends most of her time, having a good time with friends and family and her 2 dogs.