Adamya Sharma / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Samsung has filed a new patent that shows a unique idea for a device that looks like a brick with screens on all sides.
- Users will be able to unfold it and further roll out the display to get a much larger display to work with.
- This is just a patent filing and is unlikely to be commercially available anytime soon.
Samsung’s foldable phones are nice and all, but the company clearly isn’t tired of experimenting with wild ideas. Last month, we saw Samsung file a patent for phones with rollable displays. Those ideas were exciting, sure, but the company has even more ridiculous and interesting ideas in store for us.
Samsung has filed a new patent, and it probably has the strangest design for a smartphone that I’ve seen (via FixyFlow). It shows a device that looks like a weirdly elongated brick. The idea is to have a phone that’s fairly compact when in its “brick” configuration. However, Samsung is combining its foldable, bendable, and rollable display technologies to imagine a unique new type of device.
According to the patent, the phone can be unfolded to reveal a wide screen, much like the foldable phones we see today. However, the display can be rolled out even further to create a much larger screen, as shown in the patent.
It’s an interesting idea, but is it practical? I doubt it. The brick form factor looks like it’ll be quite bulky and somewhat reminiscent of early mobile phones like the Motorola DynaTAC. Samsung hasn’t mentioned any dimensions in the patent, so we can’t say for sure how compact or bulky this would be if it were real. However, it will certainly be thicker than most phones today, and that in itself could be a problem.
All those caveats aside, the idea is definitely unique. A phone that looks like it has a display on all sides, and that can be unfolded and unrolled into a device with a large tablet-like screen, is certainly interesting.
However, it is just a patent at this point. While Samsung could be testing something like this, it’s also likely that this is just an idea that the company wanted to patent. Companies do this all the time: come up with a unique idea and patent it, but never really make it a commercial product. So, if you are getting excited about having a phone with a display that unfolds and rolls out like this, you should temper your expectations for now.
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