Samsung Patent Granted For Foldable Device

Now, a device that folds itself in half is nothing new at all, as we have long seen clamshell phones in the past, leading to the likes of the Nintendo DS that brought about a renaissance of the classic Game & Watch form factor. Well, Samsung might be on to something that the future would love here after picking up a patent from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, as this particular patent points to a flexible display for a foldable TV and/or or tablet.

To make matters more interesting, Samsung did mention that they could flex OLED as well as LCD displays, as it had always been far more common to hear of OLED displays being the ones that were flexible. Perhaps Samsung is looking for that winning edge over their major rival, Apple, that could see action in mobile devices.

In the configuration that you can see above, the flexible display panel #10 happens to be an organic light-emitting diode (OLED) display panel that carries a pixel array that includes a plurality of OLEDs. The display device #100 might come across as a large-scale TV, although the described technology does not limit it to such a product boundary. Samsung also claimed, “Another embodiment of the display panel employs a liquid crystal display (LCD) technology. According to some embodiments, the flexible display panel is greater than 8 inches in size.” We guess this would place it somewhere in the realm of a Galaxy Tablet device.

Edwin Kee
Categories: General