why isn’t possible to see phone display horizontally while wearing polarized sunglasses?
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Because the light coming from your screen is polarized.
Polarized like is light that is all “aligned” with each other. And this is that really bright glare you’ll see coming off the ground or water or glass.
Polarized sunglasses work to filter out that light by having a special microscopic chemical coating that filters light traveling like that out.
So, looking at your phone normally the light hits the glasses In a way that it doesn’t filter out, but when you turn the phone 90 degrees, the light coming from your phone turns 90 degrees too, and starts to get filtered out.
The polarizer lets through light vibrating in one direction and absorbs light vibrating in all other directions.
Polarized lenses block horizontal light waves. Only vertical waves make it through the filter in the lens.
An OLED phone would work but most have LCD displays. Liquid crystals in those displays work by twisting the polarisation of light and they need a polarising filter in front of them to block light that hasn’t been twisted. That way, only light from the active pixels makes it through and the inactive pixels look black. An unavoidable side effect is that all the light coming from an LCD display is polarised.
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