Xiaomi has patented a new foldable smartphone design. This particular patent appeared at CNIPA (Chinese Patent Office).
This is a clamshell foldable smartphone by Xiaomi, and other than some design sketches that were shared, we don’t really have much info about it.
This foldable smartphone from Xiaomi folds vertically, features clamshell design
The phone folds vertically, and it has two cameras on the back, Those two cameras are vertically-aligned, and are placed in the top-left corner of the phone, when it is folded.
When folded, you also have access to a secondary display. That secondary display is really small, though, so it will probably let you know who is calling you. On the other hand, it may show you who sent you the last notification, the time, and so on.
It seems like that secondary display will be able to display one line of text only. It is really narrow, but that is the whole point, probably, to have it run all the time and have low battery consumption.
This phone’s design does remind us of what Motorola is working on at the moment. The Motorola Razr foldable smartphone is expected to arrive by the end of this year, and it will offer a clamshell form with a small secondary display, just like this device.
This phone’s hinge is placed right in the middle of this device. When unfolded, the device is quite narrow, and yet tall. Based on these design sketches, this foldable smartphone from Xiaomi will have extremely thin bezels.
The thickest bezel sits above the display
The thickest bezel will be placed above the display, where the phone’s sensors are located. Even that bezel won’t be that thick, though, based on what we can see here.
Xiaomi still did not introduce its first foldable smartphone. The company’s CEO did demonstrate the company’s prototype, but Xiaomi did not announce anything just yet.
Will this become its first foldable handset? Or will Xiaomi go with the design that Lei Jun demonstrated a while back? Well, we’ll just have to wait and see.
We’re sure that Xiaomi is working on a number of different foldable smartphone designs at this point, so who knows what they plan to release first. We are expecting to see a foldable smartphone from Xiaomi before the end of 2019, though.
We’re not sure if that is a realistic expectation, but the company has been developing them for a while now, and it should hurry up to compete with the likes of Samsung, Huawei, and Motorola.
