Samsung’s very first foldable smartphone, the Galaxy Fold, did not make it to the market just yet, and the company is already planning to release something else, something entirely different than the Galaxy Fold.
The company has patented a smartphone with a retractable display. This patent was submitted at the end of 2018, and it was approved at the end of May, but it did not surface until now. The patent had been submitted with the KIPO (Korean Intellectual Property Office).
This design patent has been revealed by Letsgodigital, who used the provided sketches of the device itself and added some color to them, and created some renders based on these sketches. In the gallery down below you can see quite a few images of this smartphone that the company patented.
The moment you take a look at those images, you will notice that this phone’s display pulls out on the right. Thanks to this feature, the phone’s display can become 50-percent larger when expanded.
Samsung obviously plans to use a flexible display in order to make things happen, and some sort of mechanism that would let the phone’s frame slide out. This smartphone that the company patented, actually comes with a curved display, and it included a display camera hole which is different to the one on the Galaxy S10 series, and the upcoming Galaxy Note10 series. That camera (and possibly earpiece) hole is thin and rather wide.
You will also notice that there’s quite a bit of space for cameras on the back (it’s marked in the provided images), in the top-right corner of the phone’s back side, while a place for a fingerprint scanner is not highlighted here. That probably means that the company plans to utilize an in-display fingerprint scanner here, if this device ver becomes a reality.
Samsung did not exactly include a detailed description of this smartphone with these sketches, at least none of those were published, so we can only guess as to how all of this will work. You will notice that some sort of buttons or ports are highlighted on the left and right side of this smartphone, and those could be triggers that allow the phone’s display to expand, but we’re only guessing.
Letsgodigital actually believes this could be the Galaxy S11, and has even come up with the Galaxy S11 Max name, but that’s just a wild guess. This phone does look like a flagship handset, and it does resemble the company’s flagship lineup to an extent, but it’s not that likely this will be the Galaxy S11, at least not in our opinion, as it’s more of an experimental device, similar to the Galaxy Fold.
If this smartphone ever becomes a reality, it’s more likely Samsung will come up with a brand new name to attach to this design, as it did for the Galaxy Fold. We do not know when or if this smartphone will become official, but it would sure be interesting to see something like this come to the market, as it’s completely different to everything else that is on offer at the moment.
