Samsung is no stranger to foldable phone and tablet patents and they’ve come up with a bunch over the past year. I’ll remind you that in early and mid November 2018 the first Galaxy Fold was shown in the guise of a screen prototype, so we should be approaching a successor unveiling. In the meantime Patentlyapple uncovered a whole bunch of new designs patented by Samsung and some of them involve foldables.
Apparently, earlier in October, the US Patent and Trademark Office published a patent application from Samsung, that involves a series of rollable device patents, tablets with tabs and dual screen devices. No less than 135 patent figures were there to review and we took some of the most interesting ones in to analyze them. The first set of pictures shows three different scrollable device designs.
We’ve seen Samsung often tackle this approach over the past year, as if they had a strange fetish for rollable devices. The idea is to have a flexible screen or surface that rolls and wraps around a cylindrical axis. It allows you to expand the viewing surface of a device and pull from its sides to do that. When you’re done, you can reduce the size and put the device back in your pocket.
These are all preliminary designs and not really fleshed out.
There’s also another patent that shows an original set of “tabs” for tablets, placed on the sides. They feel like the sort of mark you’d leave on a book to remember your place. They’re actually modular connectors, used to hook up more memory and extra batteries, apparently. Since there are many tabs, you could expand the slate’s memory quite a bit.
The last design shows a dual screen tablet, with a format very similar to a book’s. It opens and closes like a book and has a touchscreen section and a spine, plus the ability to lock and unlock the screens. Samsung is clearly looking into new formats, but I doubt we’ll see anything new till 2020.
