Huawei Reportedly Working With Chinese Display Maker To Create 8-Inch Foldable Smartphone

Last month, it was reported that Huawei might be the first company to release a foldable smartphone before the end of 2018. Now, a new report claims Huawei has partnered with a Chinese display maker to make its foldable smartphone a reality.

Huawei is said to be working alongside the Chinese display manufacturer BOE to create a foldable smartphone with an 8-inch display, according to the South Korean website ETNews. Huawei will be using BOE’s flexible OLED panels to manufacture the foldable smartphone. Huawei’s goal is to unveil its foldable smartphone this November.

BOE is China’s largest display manufacturer and is ranked as number one in producing LCD panels. The company’s sixth-generation flexible OLED panel is believed to be the most advanced technology for small to medium sized OLED displays. BOE began mass producing the display last year and it has already launched in China.

BOE is currently in attendance at the SID Display Week expo in Los Angeles, California this week, and it’s showing off its foldable displays at its booth. The company also announced that it will be showcasing at the event a foldable smartphone with a 5.99-inch display and a foldable tablet with a 7.56-inch display.

“The foldable all-screen WQHD AMOLED display launched by BOE can achieve minimum dynamic bending with a radius of only 1mm. It can be bent more than 100,000 times and has an NTSC color gamut up to 118%, which helps to improve user experience considerably,” BOE said in a press release.

BOE is also said to be working on four foldable phone designs for two other companies. Android Authority speculates that one of these other companies might be Samsung, since BOE is an in-house partner of Samsung Display. The popular rumor right now is that Samsung might launch its foldable “Galaxy X” phone sometime in early 2019. Huawei’s plan to unveil its foldable smartphone in November is said to be a conscious decision so that it could beat Samsung to the punch.

The other company that BOE might be working with could be Xiaomi or Oppo — both are Chinese phone makers who are part of the top five smartphone manufacturers in the world. Both of these companies have already filed patents for foldable devices. Other potential partners of BOE are Lenovo and ZTE, since they have already experimented with flexible displays, as pointed out by GSM Arena.