Motorola has patented a design for a borderless Flexible OLED screen, showing that it is also keen on entering a market for smartphones and other mobile devices that have little to no bezels and are capable of folding and unfolding to make for a smaller or larger form-factor. Motorola would not be the first company to dream up having a phone with a borderless display, but a recently discovered patent from the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) appears to have been published on February 8, suggesting that Motorola may have recently filed it as well.
In the gallery below in figures four and eight you can see the diagrams of what a more standard smartphone display would look like compared to what Motorola is envisioning for a borderless display. You can also see the same thing for the diagrams in figures six and seven, which again shows a more standard smartphone panel, this time of the pixels that would make up the panel compared to that of what is being referred to as a heterogeneous pixel array for the borderless screen that Motorola wants to put into a phone.
Even further down, in figure 11, the patent shows the pixel makeup of a borderless display with an active matrix, which in this particular case is comprised of two active groupings of pixels that are individually operated and separated by the light grouping of pixels in the middle, where the display could be folded. In the diagrams for figures 12 and 13 you can see the drawings for what this might look like when applied to an actual smartphone design. Motorola’s patent appears to describe a display design which it sees as applicable to both a non-foldable makeup and a foldable one which could result in a device that could be folded up to be more of a smartphone form-factor and then unfolded to be used with a larger display surface area and be used more like a tablet when the situation permits or the need arises. Since this is just a patent at the moment and it was just recently approved there’s no guarantee that Motorola will even launch a device with these kinds of features or designs, but with more than a few other major OEMs (like Samsung and LG) already working with designs like this Motorola isn’t likely to be too far off from trying to develop its own such device.
