The foldable smartphone is the subject of 2019. Many manufacturers are currently working on the development of this new type of telephone with a flexible display. This also ensures completely new designs, so the Samsung Galaxy Fold and Huawei Mate X, announced earlier this year, have a totally different appearance. Another leading manufacturer that has a folding phone in development is Google.
In May this year, Google revealed at the I/O Developer Conference that the company has since developed various prototypes of foldable displays. “We have been doing this for quite some time,” he added. A new patent shows that the American search giant can sometimes opt for a totally new approach that we have seen to date.
Google foldable phone in book design
At the end of 2018, Google LLC filed a patent with the WIPO (World Intellectual Property Office) for a ‘foldable display device with multiple pages’. The patent was published on June 27, 2019, and describes a folding smartphone that folds open like a book.
The patented technology builds on a patent that was published earlier this year. At the time, the thin module layers, in particular, were described, this time the patent goes one step further. The thin layers are implemented in such a way that the mobile device can be used as a book, consisting of several pages that can be turned over. These ‘pages’ are foldable display panels.
To start with, the flexible screen is on the inside of the patented Google foldable phone. It should be noted that the patent description leaves the room open to place the screen on the outside.
A special feature of this design is that the Google foldable phone has several flexible displays that are implemented in such a way that they function as pages that you can browse through. The OLED display pages are held together by a sort of book spine. The back is also used to process components, such as the battery, memory, processor, camera, etc.
Although there are five pages on the patent sketches, this can actually be any number of pages. Both sides of the display panels (front and back) can be used to display content. In some cases, the content may continue to the next page, just like when reading a traditional book.
It is a very unique design that offers completely new applications compared to the folding phones that we have encountered so far. Whether and with whom Google wants to release this foldable phone is as yet unknown.
Google does not produce any display panels itself. The first Google Pixel smartphones were designed in collaboration with HTC and LG. For the most recent model, Google Pixel 3, collaboration was sought with Foxconn.
