Huawei's Foldable Smartphone Speculations: New Leak Reveals Futuristic Design
The foldable smartphone game seems to have earned another competitor in Huawei.
The Chinese company appears to have been spending time on ideas for a potential foldable smartphone, as evidenced by a patent filing on the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).
Illustrations provided in the document show that Huawei's vision of their device features a single tablet-sized display that bends at the middle, resembling a book.
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The hinge looks very much like the one on the Surface 2-in-1 devices by Microsoft. It seems to be the design that not only Huawei is going for but also Samsung, as revealed in previous reports.
However, the patent by the Chinese tech firm indicates that the hinge will be a "soft supporting structure," which Android Headlines understands as being either a non-metal cushion style or metal that is covered or coated with a soft material.
More on the display, the illustrations show no bezels, something that Huawei has been working to achieve. In a recent report, CEO Richard Yu said that shedding the bezels completely for the foldable phone is one of the biggest challenges they are facing in putting the foldable smartphone together.
Indeed, apart from the fact that bezel-less has become the new norm in mobile design, the lack of such components will all the more benefit a foldable device.
The ZTE Axon M, immediately comes to mind. Instead of a bendable screen, the device comes with two panels with a massive bezel dividing the display right in the middle, which can sometimes be distracting. This is being sold by other companies by using a hinge that Huawei intends to use on theirs and a bezel-less screen.
While the foldable Huawei mobile device on the patent document certainly shows no sign of bezels, this does not mean that Huawei has found a workaround for it.
It is to be pointed out that the images are provided to show what the company wants the device to look like. Also, visualizations on patents tend to worry less about accuracy.
Either way, Huawei is committed to completely do away with bezels, making their foldable smartphone look more like the futuristic models that many users imagine.
Currently, the bezels are used to house the necessary sensors in a device, including of course the front-facing camera. Samsung's idea is to put them beneath the display along with the fingerprint scanner although successfully doing the latter is still something they are still trying to figure out, hence the component still placed on the rear in the company's latest company, the Samsung Galaxy S9. It is unclear what Huawei has in mind to be able to go fully bezel-less.
Clearly, this is a hurdle that is not easy to surpass. Huawei recently released their most powerful flagships yet, the P20 series. The handsets sported a notch that looks like the one on the iPhone X, but the company found a way to make it smaller.
There is no way of knowing when Huawei's foldable smartphone will be unveiled or if it will ever see the light of day, but the hope is that it will be released before that of Samsung and Apple.
