This Wild Samsung Rollable Smartphone Concept Makes Galaxy Fold Look Like Old News
A newly uncovered patent shows that Samsung is working on a wild rollable smartphone display that achieves the same goal as the Galaxy Fold: providing users with a large display screen that can convert into a more pocketable form-factor when not in use. The patent was published on June 11thwith the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
It shows a design that looks much like any other modern smartphone in its standard form -- albeit one with noticeable bezels at the top and bottom of the display. However, the rollable display can unfurl from two cylinders – or frame borders -- that pull out from the left and right sides of the device. When fully extend, the available display real estate roughly triples. And given that the display rolls, there won’t be an unsightly display crease as we see with the Galaxy Fold
While this design no doubt looks great, and may even be cooler than the Galaxy Fold and Huawei Mate X, it would probably be prone to some of the same design issues that plagued the Galaxy Fold. As LetsGoDigital points out, there's still the potential for dust, dirt, and other debris to work its way into the rolling mechanism, which should hinder functionality. And we could only imagine pocket lint particles working their way in between the layers of the display as they intricately roll up, causing scratches and pitting in the display surface.
However, we have to remember that this is simply a design patent and there's no guarantee that Samsung will even put something like this into production. It just gives us a glimpse into what Samsung engineers are cooking up in their labs.
As for the Galaxy Fold, it is priced at $1,980 and features a 7.3-inch Infinity Flex display and a secondary 4.6-inch cover display. As you might expect from a flagship phone approaching $2,000, it is powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon 855 SoC and 12GB of RAM. We still don't have a definitive date at this time for when the device will be officially released.
(Top image courtesy Lets Go Digital)
