There's no question the most attention-grabbing moment of the Samsung Galaxy Unpacked event last week in San Francisco was when it unveiled the Privacy Display on the S26 Ultra.
This innovative new tech offers pixel-level protection against shoulder surfers, preventing anyone who might be next to you from seeing your screen. It's a really cool feature, and I've already seen what might be next. I'll explain, but first a little recap.
Privacy Display differs from a privacy screen protector in a few different ways. First, it works whether your phone is in portrait or landscape mode, offering a full 360-degrees of protection. It also can be easily and quickly turned on and off from settings, and applied to either your whole screen or to small areas where you may be inputting your PIN or password.
These small areas are very small indeed. They're eally just slivers of the screen. But grand plans are in motion to make these areas larger. At the Samsung Display booth at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the company showed off the progress it has made so far in developing and deploying Privacy Display, but also the work already underway to improve the tech.
Behind clear plexiglass were two phones with the note "under development" written below them. The first phone showed the Privacy Display working on the entire bottom half of the screen, while the second showed it working on a panel that ran down one side of the screen.
The hope is that eventually you can obscure any part of the screen you like. Katie Collins/CNET
These demos show how Samsung Display is experimenting with applying Privacy Display to larger portions of the screen, the booth representative told me. Apparently this is more of a challenge than getting it to work over the entire display or very small sections. The idea is that eventually you can choose the specific areas of the screen you might want to hide from view.
This is clearly still a work in progress for Samsung Display. The demos I saw on the Samsung Display booth were effective, but they weren't quite as successful at obscuring what was on the screen as Privacy Display is when the tech is in use on the S26 Ultra.
There's no guarantee that Samsung Electronics, which is an entirely separate company, will choose to integrate this into the next generation of the Galaxy S series (the S27 Ultra?) when it launches next year.
That said, companies tend to be keen to iterate year on year. With Privacy Display receiving such a warm welcome, it would be surprising if Samsung didn't integrate the latest developments in this technology into its phones, not to mention its tablets and laptops.
... continue reading