The technology for foldable displays is currently not exactly brilliant. The well-known manufacturers such as Samsung had to learn in the past few weeks in a painful way and admit. But if the flexible screens are only ready for the market, the development of novel gadgets hardly seems to be limited.
What excesses the creativity of the manufacturers could take in the future, shows a recently published patent from IBM – but it does not resemble the existing designs of flexible smartphones from other manufacturers. This is a 3-in-1 project, in which the foldable screen will change the form of the device from the size of the smartwatch, through the smartphone to a large tablet.
We have already seen many designs of devices with a foldable, flexible or folding screen. Typically, the size of the panel allowed the use of devices like smartphones, with the possibility of expanding the working space to the form of a tablet. IBM went a step further and wants to smuggle in his project the possibility of folding the screen so that it could be used in the form of a smartwatch.
The patent titled Variable display size for an electronic display device was submitted in 2016 by International Business Machines Corporation. But only on June 11, 2019, the patent was approved and published in the USPTO (the United States Patent and Trademark Office).
The patented design is based on the base form of the smartwatch – it looks like a (normal) watch on the wrist, though with a thicker casing and a large, rectangular display without frames (size 2×3 inches). Seven additional parts of the screen with the same dimensions were hidden under the main screen. These displays can be removed from the housing independently of each other.
The housing of the watch offers space for four compartments, each of which contains a maximum of two parts of the display. The housing can be easily pulled off an additional part of the screen – when using the four parts, the device will automatically switch from smartwatch mode to smartphone mode, with a different interface, adapted to the size of the device.
And when you need a larger workspace, just add more parts of the screen to get something like a tablet. Unfortunately, it is not clear from the patent description whether the screening and folding is done manually, semi-automatically or completely automatically. The patent does not answer the question of charging, connecting peripherals, placing speakers, etc.
On the other hand, this is a rather interesting procedure and shows that IBM is working on more common products for users. Maybe it’s a foretaste of IBM’s entry into this market, but rather we’ll have to wait for IBM to ever create something real.
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