News / Google wants to build dual folding smartphones, suggests latest patent

Google's idea of a folding smartphone consists of a dual folding mechanism. The dual fold design is intended to cleverly mask the gap between the bends. Google's concept has a Z-folding screen. The gap between the panels at the point of the bend is noticeably big. The device can be folded to almost half its size. The patent only mentions a modern computing device and not a smartphone.

So far, the patent only mentions a modern computing device and not a smartphone. Therefore, there are high chances that this patent could be just documenting Google's idea of a folding device. Or, Google could be referring to folding smartphones as modern computing device due to the array of functionality that a folding phone brings with itself. Nonetheless, the technology that Google portrays is different from all the implementation we have seen so far.

Similar to Xiaomi's implementation, Google is going for a dual folding device concept where the display folds at two points. However, Google's concept goes for a different approach than that of Xiaomi's. Google's concept has a Z-folding screen, i.e. the screen fold in the shape of 'Z'. There's a definitely a downside to this folding design - the gap between the panels at the point of the bend is noticeably big. The positive side of this implementation is that the device can be folded to almost half its size.