Bendable smartphones won’t be coming any time soon

Mass-produced mobile devices with flexible, and eventually foldable, screens may be as far as a decade away, according to Max McDaniel, chief marketing officer of Applied Materials’s display business group.

Samsung Electronics’s Galaxy Round smartphone retails in Korea for about $1,000. It’s that expensive for a reason. The curved display has graduated from science fiction to store shelves, but manufacturing them is still a challenging and expensive process. Screen makers are struggling to figure out the techniques needed to produce millions of the screens cheaply.