Through the looking glass
Design and innovation journalist, Rima Sabina Aouf, examines the current tech behind our ubiquitous screens and what the future holds.
Pull quote: 67% of adults wish they spent less time on their devices, up significantly from 51% the previous year.
The average person looks at theirs before they roll out of bed, a hundred times throughout the day and even, regrettably, in the middle of the night. Ubiquitous and near-impossible to ignore, the modern smartphone screen has had a profound impact on our lives since arriving with the first iPhone in 2007. Within five years, Apple had sold more than 250 million units and, together with Samsung, displaced Nokia and BlackBerry as the top vendors in the mobile phone market. Until the arrival of generative AI, no other technology product had a faster adoption cycle. It’s a shift that deeply changed our relationship to screens, bringing a world of colour, clarity and interactivity into our pockets, and now it’s poised for disruption once again.
The all-screen phone was made possible by the maturation and convergence of several technologies in the 2000s: high-quality liquid-crystal displays (LCD) bringing good depth of colour and brightness, chemically strengthened Gorilla Glass that resisted cracking and, above all, capacitive multi-touch sensing. Responding to the slight electrical charge from the user’s fingertips rather than the pressure of a stylus or single digit, this technology paved the way for today's touchscreen keyboards and light, multi-finger gestures such as pinching to zoom. Interactions feel intuitive and rewarding, like physically handling an object, subtly deepening our emotional connection to our devices. This gesture control is also intrinsically tied to what we now recognise as the dark side of mobile phone technology, contributing to habitual checking and addictive patterns. For every scroll, there is an infinite scroll, where repeated rapid gestures load endless content, and for every swipe, there is a swipe left, popularised by dating apps and signifying easy rejection in the face of a never-ending smorgasbord of options. These gestures have become metaphors for modern restlessness.
Interaction design features partly explain how global average media consumption has managed to roughly double since 2010, to now over 12 hours a day – a figure that seems impossible until you take into account the other smartphone-era phenomena of ‘second screening’, where we concurrently consume multiple content sources. The resulting ‘information overload’ may be why, according to a 2025 Deloitte survey, 67% of adults wish they spent less time on their devices, up significantly from 51% the previous year. Among 18-34 year olds, that figure climbs to 82%. Screens have brought us connection, information and entertainment on demand, but they’ve also become a dominant source of anxiety.
Beneath the glass, the technology has undergone its own quiet revolution. In a quest for richer colours, deeper blacks and thinner form factors, manufacturers have switched from LCD to OLED and AMOLED, which work through organic compounds that emit light when electric current passes through them, eliminating the need for backlighting. This enables true blacks, higher contrast ratios and thin, flexible displays. Samsung occupies a unique position here as both supplier and competitor, reserving its highest-quality M-Series panels for its own Galaxy flagships and Apple’s iPhones while selling lower-tier variants to other manufacturers. The drive to keep delivering consumers ever better displays is partly why flagship phones continue to go up in price. For consumers, however, perhaps the only visible change in all these years has been the arrival of folding screens, enabled by those flexible OLEDs. What started as an expensive novelty with a flurry of concepts, sneak peeks and troubled product launches in 2018 and 2019 has become an established niche in the mobile market, offering fans the screen real estate of a tablet in a pocketable form. Today’s most successful examples, like Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold 7 or the compact Motorola Razr Ultra, feature near-invisible creases and refined hinges, and as they’ve become more durable they’ve been able to garner an increasing market share, especially in China and South Korea. That could explode in 2026 if the rumours about an iPhone Fold turn out to be true.
The near future promises refinements rather than revolutions. Foldable could evolve into rollable, with speculation abounding that Samsung will become the first manufacturer off the mark with a Galaxy Z Roll later this year. Based on earlier concepts shown by the brand and Chinese disrupters Oppo and Tecno, these will involve a motorised adaptive screen that, at the touch of a button, unfurls like a scroll rather than opening like a book. Meanwhile, MicroLED looms as the potential next premium tier, offering OLED’s benefits with better brightness, longer lifespan and lower power use – though manufacturing challenges keep it perpetually just out of reach. The real prize here is power efficiency: MicroLEDs meaningfully extend battery life could potentially free us from the nightly charging ritual or enable always-on displays without compromise. In the longer term, things might start to look more sci-fi, with holographic screens that let us video call in 3D like we’re in Star Wars. It’s an area of constant research and advancement, but although there are already laptops and displays like Sony Spatial Reality, opinions vary on whether the technologies can be made good enough at palm-sized to warrant the power drain.More likely is that today’s emerging screen technologies will not change smartphones so much as deliver alternative personal devices. Silicon Valley is currently buzzing about the opportunities to use AI agents, neural interfaces and screen innovations to move into a world of ambient technology, where technology is embedded around us rather than something we pull out of our pockets when we desire (or are drawn into) interaction, and most hardware innovation is now concentrated in headsets and glasses. Meta, Apple and startups alike are betting that screens we wear will eventually supplant screens we hold. But the smartphone and its screen may turn out to be the preferred mode of interaction as it grants agency over when to look, what to attend to, and when to disconnect. Glasses and wearables seem more intrusive, inserting technology more permanently into our field of vision and social interactions. There’s value in being able to put a screen away.
A small but telling counter-trend is the e-ink display – the technology behind Kindle, now appearing in minimalist phones and note-taking devices like the Mudita Kompakt and reMarkable tablet. E-ink offers a deliberately calming alternative: no refresh rate, no blue light, no endless scroll. It’s slow, almost meditative. In some ways, it is made for this era, when consumer choices around technology are being shaped not just by the uncritical embrace of new capabilities but by resistance to the rapid rise of AI and the dominance of Big Tech. Whatever comes next – folding, rolling or worn – will have to reckon with that ambivalence.
