Samsung is on the cusp of several major announcements at the moment, including the unveiling of the Galaxy Note 10 series set for next month at the Unpacked event as well as the new release date supposedly coming any day now for the company’s second try at a foldable phone. Early next year, meanwhile, we’ll see the next high-end Galaxy phone, the Galaxy S11, about which the rumor mill is already starting to crank out intriguing tidbits. There’s been some chatter that the handset may get an all-new design in a break from previous iterations in the series — and now, a new Samsung patent that’s been spotted could offer an additional hint at what’s to come.
Samsung is constantly generating a slew of patents showing off all manner of proposed future handset designs — some incremental, while others seem pretty strange and downright bizarre. Sort of the tech industry version of one of those fashion shows where you see models strutting down the catwalk in designs you know that normal people would absolutely never touch. We’ve reported on a number of the company’s creations along these lines, which have teased foldable phones and phones with expandable screens and so much more. This time around, though, the design that’s been laid out looks like something more in the realm of practicality and may even hint at a direction the company’s Galaxy S11 series could go in.
What Samsung is proposing in a newly published patent from the Korean Intellectual Property Office (h/t to Dutch tech news site LetsGoDigital) is a handset with an extendable display that pulls out from one side, increasing the overall effective display surface area by about 50%. You can see a 3D rendering the Dutch site prepared based on the patent documentation below:
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The patent documentation also makes clear this proposed handset would have a punch-hole camera positioned in the middle of the front display. As is also rumored to be the case with the Note 10, this would be a continuation of Samsung moving to this new camera setup that, among other things, allows for thinner bezels at the top of the display. The camera on the back, meanwhile, is positioned in the top right corner of this new proposed device.
Samsung is increasingly releasing a growing selection of variations for its top handset models, like it did with the release of the S10, S10+, S10e, and S10 5G. You can almost see this new design being a possibility as one of several new Galaxy S11 designs — though the Note handsets are known, among other things, for large displays, so you could arguably make the same case for inclusion in the Note 11 family.
Regardless, it should be clear by now that the failure back in April of the company’s Galaxy Fold that was rushed to market before being pulled back hasn’t hampered the company’s appetite for trying new things, embarrassing though that high-profile failure was. It will be interesting to see if the company has learned its lessons from the Fold debacle — and, more important, how it incorporates those lessons into new experiments (like this new design, perhaps) going forward.
