Slimmer, lighter, stronger – Samsung reveals foldable display plans to combat Apple and other rivals

Samsung has produced some of the best folding phones, with Huawei the only brand that might rival the Korean electronics giant for its long-term commitment to the segment. Samsung's advantage, however, is that it makes a lot of the hardware it uses, it doesn't just build phones from parts it buys in.

That's where we come to the display. Samsung has announced a new brand for its folding displays, called Mont Flex. It's a slight oddity, with "Mont" coming from the French for mountain. That's supposed to "represent the pinnacle of foldable innovation", while it's also an acronym.

That's right, "Mont" shoehorns in "mechanical durability", "opto-mechanically flat", "narrow bezels" and "thin and lightweight design" – doesn't that just trip off the tongue?

The new branding is designed to pull together all the core tenets of Samsung's folding displays to better sell those features, with the claim that its latest display tech will offer 500,000 folds in its lifetime. That would equate to 50 folds a day for 27 years.

Samsung entered the folding phone game in 2019 with the Galaxy Fold, and it has released increasingly refined models since. The Galaxy Z Fold 7 and Z Flip 7 are each surprisingly thin and light, for example.

Samsung pushed the idea of Ultra Thin Glass (UTG) for protection. This is bonded to the OLED layer of the panel and sits under the protective layers that sit over the top. The company also uses a technology called Lead, which is a polariser-free OLED display that helps increase brightness and reduces thickness by up to 20%.

It's these elements that Samsung is pushing under the Mont Flex brand, as interest in folding displays grows. That's great for Samsung's own phones – the Galaxy Z Fold 7 benefitting from this tech – as it moves to fend off rivals, which might also include an iPhone Fold in the future.

As Samsung is a big supplier to brands including Apple, there's a chance that the raising of brand awareness is also to help drive desirability for these components. Some phone manufacturers already promote the fact that they have a Samsung display in their phone – and why should folding phones be any different?

Just as brands like Qualcomm have pushed Snapdragon as a consumer favourite and Sony cameras in phones get the same treatment, it looks like gunning for a Samsung display in your folding phone could be the next big thing.