The foldable smartphone game is about to kick-off, while the market is already alive (and dominated by Samsung’s models). Just to mention some of the rumors that have surfaced in recent months, Google “would” have two leaflets in the pipeline (but the project seems to be canceled at the moment ), Apple is working on a variant of the iPhone but it seems a bit more delayed, unlike Oppo which instead it seems on the piece and about to take the field with at least one Huawei Mate Xs- style product.
The air of novelty that reigns in the Oppo house seems to have also invaded the executive floors of the cousins of OnePlus, producing a patent for a folding smartphone in its own way innovative. The related documentation would have been filed in China at the end of 2020, then approved last July and now delivered to the database of the WIPO, the world office for intellectual property from which it “escaped” until it reaches us.
The OnePlus patent consists of folding with two hinges that allow you to obtain different configurations. Some of the possible ones have been processed and you can see them in the images: the applications are multiple, so potentially the idea of OnePlus can result in an extremely versatile device in a body that, thickness aside, seems to be similar in size to that of a smartphone. traditional.
One of the two hinges of the OnePlus patent is visibly more compact, which on the one hand could give rise to some problems in terms of its ability to hold the display still in a certain position, but on the other it allows you to close “sandwich” the most delicate portion of the screen and to keep the overall thickness within the acceptable limits.
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Of particular interest is the “triangle” configuration achievable with a two-hinged folding like that of OnePlus: in this way, potentially, two people could use the same device to perform different operations, such as watching streaming content on one side and browsing. on the web on the other. Not an absolute novelty, since LG had obtained the same versatility with the Dual Screen, but it would be relative to folding smartphones.
Assuming that OnePlus manages to come out on the market with the folding with two hinges before others who could realize the same idea in a shorter time. The (timid) hypothesis has been advanced that the foldable OnePlus may arrive on the market as early as 2022, but to tell the truth, there are no concrete clues to this effect, and we will first need to dispel the uncertainties related to the difficulty of producing a reliable product with a double the number of hinges compared to those that caused not negligible difficulties for Samsung with the first generations of the Galaxy Z.
There is little doubt that the foldable does not precede the OnePlus 10 and 10 Pro in the Chinese company’s 2022 lineup.