Electronics heavyweight Huawei’s research and development team has designed a new and improved ‘foldable display’ for smartphones that transform into tablets.
Huawei has been in the news recently for filing a patent for two smartphone designs that could effectively fix build quality issues and lend better ease-of-use to the existing line-up of foldable smartphones.
There are speculations of a design language wherein these two foldable smartphone variants would keep the main display area at the back of the phone when used as a smartphone. This way selfies will be possible via the main cameras.
One render of the folding design reveals that the display is not fully integrated into the housing and goes around the outer shell. The purported AMOLED display is set on a rail mechanism and looks like the existing Huawei Mate XS. One of the display designs, evident from the filed patent, tends to offer a larger screen real estate than the other, but compromises on the build quality.
The patent was approved and published on April 14, 2020 by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). Similar patents are regularly applied by such companies and don’t mean that such a concept device would get picked up for mass production.
The Galaxy Fold from Samsung and Huawei’s own Mate X have not been widely popular due to the overall build quality issues and price. Low on durability and high on price seem to be the norm for foldable smartphones as of now.
Other brands are also improving on their foldable display designs including Samsung, TCL and Motorola. For instance, TCL had a design concept for smartphones that ‘pulls-out’ of a small housing, doing away with any folding mechanism.
How Huawei executes this conceptual design differently for its upcoming lineup of folding smartphones remains to be seen.
