We’ve seen quite a few flexible device patents over the years, some of them related to Samsung and some of them not, but this latest one is a doozy. We’ve come across a patent that shows a scroll-like tablet, with a rollable display. It comes from the US Patent and Trademark Office and it’s shown below.
This document leaked together with one showing a smartwatch with an optical zoom camera smack dab in the middle of the watch’s body. The patent regarding the tablet shows an “electronic device with a rollable screen”. Such scroll-like mechanisms have been prototyped for years now, but they haven’t quite made it to the mainstream. It feels like a projector canvas, if you will.
The flexible display is wrapped around a roll and the opposite side of the device gets pulled outwards, as the display rolls out. Depending on the roll’s rotation, the device will determine what the active area of the screen is and react according to that. This can expand or shrink the viewing and input area and to me this feels more like an e-reader than an actual tablet.
Patents are just patents however and it doesn’t mean we’re about to see a real product like this soon.
