LG granted patents of a smartphone with book-like foldable design

LG has never shyed away from innovating in the smartphone industry. Just look at the G series and how it changes every year. Well, the most interesting idea that seems to be on the horizon is of the foldable variety with Samsung as the forerunner. LG seems to be working on it though. World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) granted a patent to LG electronics today that clearly displays a foldable smartphone. The company applied for the patent in 2017 and it has been granted just this month.

The patent shows two designs not very different from each other. LG imagines a foldable phone as a book that can open and close with the display inside. As earlier seen in a Samsung patent, an in-folding display that when folded becomes a single vertical bar. One of the images also shows a secondary display on the outside that maybe just an Ambient display. The other design is also similar but one of the two folds stretches longer than the other creating a protruding second display when folded. As always, with patents, you never know if you’ll ever see them as a real product. Moreover, we’ve not heard much about LG’s plans to make a foldable phone for itself at least.

Last year, we did see reports that Apple was working with LG for its foldable phone displays. Surely, the Korean giant has the supplies and knowhow that place it in a promising position for such a product. The foldable OLED displays can be manufactured at one of their new OLED manufacturing units.

Meanwhile, Samsung is quite close to releasing a final product as it demonstrated behind closed doors at CES 2018. Another competitor is ZTE. Up till now, what ZTE has shown is not impressive but the company CEO has reiterated their ambition to evolve the design of the ZTE Axon M. At the moment all eyes are on Samsung’s first product which will pave the way for other industry giants and also gauge customer expectations regarding the foldable concept. Samsung’s Galaxy X is bound for launch late in 2018.