“Apple has been granted a patent for a folding phone for the second time in a month,” Libby Plummer and Shivali Best report for The Daily Mail. “The patents have led to rumours that the Cupertino brand’s upcoming iPhone 8 could be influenced by 1990s flip phones, made popular by Motorola.”
“The new patent illustration shows a hinge in the middle of the handset’s display that would enable it to bend in half,” Plummer and Best report. “The patent document suggests a flexible nitinol, a nickel and titanium alloy for the handset’s support structure on one of several variations listed in the patent.”
“One version of the design leaves the screen hidden when the phone is folded in two, similar to clamshell phones of the past,” Plummer and Best report. “Another, leaves the screen visible, but reduced to half its size.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Flip iPhone™.
We loved our Motorola StarTACs, but they really didn’t do much of anything except for oh-so-quaint voice calls.
SEE ALSO:
Apple granted U.S. patent for bendable or foldable iPhone using advanced carbon nanotube structures – November 1, 2016
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Lynn Weiler” for the heads up.]
I remember buying the Motorola Razer on Black Friday the year of debut.
It was cool and I loved it.
Flip iPhone has intriguing possibilities.
“Captain, I can’t change the laws of physics.”
-Scotty
Maybe Apple can … 😊
Anyone been watching Westworld on HBO? They’ve some rather cool tablet like device use to program & control the life-like bots. When FOLDED it bares a stricking resemblance to an iPhone 6/7 Plus.
Yes. They are triptychs, tri-fold. I haven’t caught in the visuals much more than that, such as how they fold up. But I’m not through the entire series yet. I’ve seen them being used as three separate screens of data as well as one whole screen. They’re both touch devices and voice activated. They don’t talk back, which is interesting. I’d suspect that would be something the user could switch on or off. That they don’t want them to talk may be insightful of our future. Maybe we don’t want Majel Barrett Roddenberry talking at us all day, unless of course we’re visually impaired. – – The mysterious future…
Um, yeah. It’s sort of like a ‘flip phone’. But that’s not the concept. It’s a full screen phone that provides the space-saving feature of being able to be folded in half. No more massive, big-ass PHABLETS the are bigger than your pocket. Instead, you get twice the screen real estate at half the pocket size.
Thanks for that explanation.
I have shied away from the big-ass phones for the same reason and purchased the SE — love it.
But now you got me thinking of more real estate at half-size. Bring it on …