Motorola patented a foldable smartphone that when extended would transform into a tablet, and by the looks of the drawings found over at the World Intellectual Property Organization the hinge would have a similar design to that of the Lenovo YOGA Android tablet. The patent was granted back in the middle of March of this year and published shortly after that, and looks to be based on the design of the foldable smartphone concept that Lenovo showed off a couple of years ago with the same capability to unfold into a tablet, alongside its other foldable phone concept that would wrap around your wrist.
The description states the design is a foldable housing comprised of three parts, and that’s made clearly visible in the drawing which you can see in the image above where the phone is configured into a tent-like design. The phone would likely have a versatile build making it possible to be used in the phone configuration, the completely unfolded tablet configuration, and a third configuration where the phone screen could be propped up almost like it had a kickstand that would make it perfect for watching video hands-free.
In addition to having a foldable design that would allow for different configurations based on the user’s needs, it’s suggested that the device would be able to charge wirelessly via a case, but perhaps more interesting is the potential inclusion of 3D stereoscopic image capture when the phone is in an unfolded state utilizing both the front camera and back camera at the same time. This wouldn’t be the first device to include some sort of 3D image capture as the LG G Slate had two cameras on the back that were for this exact purpose, but it wasn’t a feature which really took off with consumers, so it also wasn’t implemented in many devices. There doesn’t appear to be any detail in the patent about a possible name for this device or when it might make a debut, but with the patent having been granted and published recently it’s entirely possible that Lenovo and Motorola Mobility are advancing the development on this device.
