Surface Phone patent solves curved screen issue for folding smartphones

For a folding smartphone, the first solution that comes to one’s mind is a flexible screen. But if you sit and think about it, because of the need for a having a sufficient turn radius, this would involve quite a thick device. Two screens would also seem a viable solution, but what about that center bezel that would be left?

Another solution would be using a curved screen on the edge, but this would trigger a new problem stemming from the distortion of the image that is caused by a curved screen. Microsoft might just have come up with another great solution which might solve all problems.

Microsoft explains the new technique in a 2017 patent

As you already know, Microsoft’s folding smartphone is in the works for quite a while now and we have seen a lot of ways in which the company has been working on solving the issue on joining together two internal screens in order to obtain a single surface.

Now, in a new patent that’s called Curved Edge Display With Controlled Luminance, the company details a brand new technique that would make use of a special layer. This layer would correct the distorted image, and it would give the appearance of a flat surface despite the fact that there is a curve in reality.

The display matrix includes a flat face portion, a curved corner portion, a light-releasing surface, and a series of pixels extending across the flat face portion and around the curved corner portion.

You can read the complete patent.

One of the most intriguing things about this patent is not the technology that is described, but the fact that it was filed more than one year ago, in January 2017. This can mean that Microsoft hasn’t ditched the project two years ago, but it’s still working on it, so we can expect to see this smartphone sometime in the future.

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