The Galaxy Z Flip will be unveiled on February 11th alongside the Galaxy S20, and there are plenty of reasons to be excited. For starters, it’s a clamshell device just like the 2020 Razr, which will make it a lot easier to carry around. Secondly, the phone is supposed to feature better specs than the Razr, and it’s said to be cheaper than both Motorola’s foldable and Samsung’s Galaxy Fold.
But the Galaxy Z Flip’s best rumored feature concerns the screen quality. And Samsung may have just confirmed the one feature that we were most excited might be present on the Z Flip.
The Galaxy Fold’s chief problem, even after it was redesigned, is the plastic screen. It’s so fragile that Samsung will warn you to handle it with care so you don’t accidentally scratch or pierce it. The Z Flip might not have the same problem, several reports have suggested in the past few months. The handset will feature a thin layer of glass on top of the OLED display which should make the entire screen assembly a lot more resistant to damage.
Dutch-language blog LetsGoDigital, which is well-known for finding trademarks and patents from all over the world, has found a trademark application for the word “UTG” that applies to multiple products that have screens. The actual design of the word also seems to imply it’s related to foldable devices.
UTG stands for Ultra Thin Glass, which are three words that we’ve seen in plenty of Galaxy Z Flip reports recently. Having a foldable display made of glass is a significant accomplishment, and it’s something that Samsung would understandably want to trademark and advertise in the future.
The UTG screens might measure less than 100 micrometers (µm) when it comes to thickness, LetsGoDigital says, and possibly as thin as 30µm, which is the thickness of a human hair. UTG displays will be more scratch-resistant than plastic, but they’ll also be more challenging to produce. It’s unclear who’s making them, although a report last year said Corning was developing foldable glass for future devices.
What’s interesting about the UTG trademark documentation that Samsung filed with the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) on January 30th, 2020 is that Samsung’s name doesn’t actually appear. Instead, the trademark was filed by lawyers from Spain. However, the same association filed other trademarks for Samsung, and UTG is likely going to be something we see on multiple foldable phones from Samsung this year.
The Galaxy Fold 2 is rumored to come with stylus support, which means the phone must have a more resistant display than the previous model. The S Pen would likely damage a plastic screen like the one found on the original Galaxy Fold, but it should work great on displays made of glass.
