Every two or three days we get to see a brand new Microsoft or Samsung patent that explores yet another way to make a laptop, tablet or phone fold and expand with a bigger screen estate. Today we run into a Microsoft foldable tablet patent, that feels oddly familiar.
This new document shows a foldable tablet that can slide into a keyboard dock. It may remind you of a Surface Book or an ASUS Transformer Pad or some other similar device. The tablet-like machine docks to the keyboard, but it also functions separately with fold and all. If you ask me, this is a horror show of ergonomics and innards. Imagine the crazy engineer work to make a central structure that can bent for the tablet and at the same time leave a GAP for the docking mechanism, which is by no means small.
The amount of breakage points here is seriously insane. One would imagine that folding the tablet in two would offer you a piece of screen estate for a virtual keyboard, which doesn’t seem to happen here, for some reason. A patent is still just a patent and there’s no reason to believe this will happen. Andromeda Surface Phone is most likely just a dual display machine, a 5.5 inch phone that becomes an 8 inch tablet or something like that.
Providing an original device format and than adding something extra on top like a dock sounds like something ASUS would do, not Microsoft.
