We still don’t know many things about the upcoming flagship smartphone from Samsung, the Galaxy S7. We’ve seen some renders which do show that the company will use a very similar design to the one of the current flagship lineup, so the internals would have to be better to offer consumers a reason to buy the new phone. Now, Samsung has trademarked a name that doesn’t tell much about a particular feature’s implementation, but it could be related to some rumors we’ve been hearing about the upcoming Galaxy S7. It’s not uncommon for companies to patent some of their developments or names of exclusive technologies that they have been working on for a while, but those could give us an idea of which components the company looking to upgrade.
The trademark application was filed on November 27th for the term “Duo Pixel”. As you can see, the term applies to a bunch of different areas, as pixels are found on displays and camera sensors, it could even refer to some sort of special software. If this is applied to a display, it could be a technology to display two different images within a single display, perhaps when viewed at different angles, so two people could see different content on a smartphone at the same time. The term might even refer to a secondary screen, which might have to do with creating a 3D effect on the screen, possibly used in some VR headset.
The cameras on Samsung smartphones are often considered among the most powerful ones, producing great pictures in various scenarios, so the company must surely be thinking of ways to further improve picture quality. So if we think of a camera with “Duo Pixel” technology, we might think of the sensor that the company is supposedly experimenting with, for their new flagship phone. The new 1/2-inch camera sensor with 12-megapixels of resolution is supposed to have larger pixels than those found on more traditional camera sensors, similar to the pixels in the sensors on the new Nexus phones, which capture more light and overall produce good pictures. As for the “Duo” part, the new sensor is said to use dual-PD (dual photodiode) technology. Some companies have used technology that allows to include two photodiodes for each pixel rather than a single one, resulting in faster focusing for the camera in still photos and videos, which would certainly benefit the photos on a newer Samsung device.
