It appears that the industrial designers over at Samsung have expanded their creative horizons beyond Apple products to include parodies of Apple products as well, one of which in particular they’ve spent a great deal of effort recreating in a recent patent filing. The result is a retractable monstrosity of a display that could up the ante for the Android screen size wars by several notches.
The design implements the flexible organic light-emitting diode technology that has been making waves in the smart TV market to squeeze considerably more pixels into the phone than its length could otherwise support. Samsung doesn’t specify exactly how much more in the filing, but does reveal how you’d use the arrangement.
The screen unfolds from its S-shape folded state inside the case, illustrated above, through a groove in the hinged plate that makes up top of the phone (shown at the bottom of the sketch). The other end is much the same except without the hole for the screen, which allows the case to flatten as you pull out the display in order to support the expanded formfactor.
The setup addresses the trade-off between screen size and convenience, but creates several more in the process. For starters, the case needs to be relatively thick to accommodate the flexible display, which not only makes it less comfortable to hold also adds extra weight to the phone. That should keep Samsung’s engineers plenty busy on the journey to production.