A new Apple patent application describes what may be a more practical approach to creating a folding iPhone or iPad.
Folding smartphones don’t have the best of track records so far…
Samsung’s Galaxy Fold launch was a disaster, with review units failing after just two days’ use. The updated version almost immediately started suffering problems, too. Microsoft’s Surface Duo failed during a launch demo. The Motorola Razr died during robot testing of the fold.
Apple’s patent application describes an approach using two completely separate screens that can act as a single display when unfolded. It was spotted by Patently Apple, and is written in the usual dense patent language.
It describes magnets being used to align the screens.
In response to detection of adjacency between the edges of the first and second devices, the devices may transition from an independent operating mode in which each device operates separately to a joint operating mode in which resources of the devices are shared.
In the joint operating mode, images may extend across displays in the devices, speakers in respective devices may be used to play different channels of an audio track, cameras and sensors in different devices may be used in cooperation with each other, and other resources may be shared.
Whether the patent will be granted is unclear, as the Microsoft Surface Duo and Neo (the latter seen in the image above, and video below) use the same approach. However, patents often hinge (sorry!) on quite fine details.
We’ve seen a number of concepts for folding iPhones, with UBS suggesting we might see a folding iPad first.
Is this a style of folding iPhone or iPad you’d like to see? Personally I’m not persuaded by the idea of an image split by a hinge, but let us know your thoughts in the comments.
