Since the introduction of the “full screen” design brought by Xiaomi with the Mi MIX series (sort of), every phone maker has been trying to bring the highest screen-to-body ratio achievable with the technology available on the market. As you all probably know, the first move adopted by many phone makers was the creation of a notch to keep the front selfie snapper in its place. That was followed by a pop-up camera mechanism on devices such as the Vivo NEX and the Oppo Find X.
In recent months, Xiaomi, Lenovo and Honor went with a sliding mechanism to hide the camera and other sensors below the display; this increased the StB ratio to numbers never seen before. Now, while that path doesn’t seem the better one on a practical point, Chinese phone maker Huawei appears to be somewhat interested in still bringing a device with this design.
Huawei Sliding Phone Patent Shows Up Online
Online news site Letsgodigital has indeed discovered a new Huawei patent which would basically confirm the company is working on a smartphone with a sliding mechanism.
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The Huawei sliding phone patent has been found in the database of the World Intellectual Property Office and as it can be seen in the renderings, it portrays a device with a dual camera setup, a flash and sensor on top, which then gets hidden by sliding it down. Meanwhile on the back we “only” find two rear cameras and no fingerprint scanner, suggesting that the handset might pack an under display type of scanning technology.
Honor’s president – Zhao Ming – said after the release of Huawei Mate X that “Honor will also be launching a foldable phone”. So it wouldn’t be that surprising if in future Huawei will come back at Honor by borrowing the design of the Magic 2 slider phone. Alternatively, we might just be looking at a patent Huawei decided to put out just in case sliding phones go mainstream, which is something that doesn’t seem very likely to happen at the time of writing.
