Earlier this year, during the Mobile World Congress 2019 in Barcelona, Huawei announced its first foldable 5G smartphone — Huawei Mate X. The phone was expected to go on sale later this month, but the launch has been postponed till September to avoid a fate similar to the Samsung Galaxy Fold.
While both Samsung and Huawei have postponed the launch of its first foldable smartphones, the companies aren’t backing down when it comes to the development of foldable smartphones.
We recently learned that Samsung is working on a new smartphone design with the rollable display while Oppo is working on a foldable smartphone having a pop-up front-facing camera sensor. Now, we have learned about Huawei’s new foldable smartphone design thanks to a patent filing, first reported by letsgodigital.
The patent shows the phone’s display on the outside which can be folded twice. Also, unlike the current Huawei Mate X design, there’s no sidebar visible. In total, the company has three models with this patent design, as shown in the image below.
It is revealed that the flexible screen of the Huawei phone is held in place by magnets. The folding mechanism looks ingenious where the unit has two hinges attached to the sides of the enclosure.
The user will reportedly have the ability to configure the display panels on the device. For example, when all three display sides are opened, the user can configure it to use all three screens for a single layout mode having one large display.
Currently, there’s no information about the phone’s software but it won’t be surprising if the company decides to use its own HongMeng OS in the Chinese market (could be named Ark OS for the international markets) as the company is facing a ban from using Google-backed Android on its devices.
As said, apart from the likes of Samsung and Huawei, several other smartphone manufacturers are working on its own version of the foldable smartphone, including Xiaomi and Oppo. These new smartphones are expected to get announced by the end of this year.
(Source)
