Microsoft's new Surface could adopt a very different screen hinge design, with newly-spotted patents suggesting the company is flirting with an iPad Pro-style floating hinge. Currently, the Surface Book has a detachable screen - which pulls away from the keyboard to form a standalone tablet - while the Surface Laptop adopts a more traditional notebook form-factor.
Many use their smartphones to capture anything anywhere, sometimes even in difficult or dangerous locations and positions. One thing our powerful smartphones will never be able to do is to take aerial photos, at least not without some help from a drone or any other flying contraption. Never say never, as they say, and Vivo seems to be thinking of something to solve that problem. Its latest patent shows a smartphone that houses an honest-to-goodness quadcopter drone to take pictures from above, almost like in the movies.
A new patent filed by Samsung has turned up at the WIPO, and it shows an interesting folding smartphone with a new feature. Samsung has built smartphones in the past with rotating front camera modules, but the patent shows the first time a rotating camera has been combined with a folding device. The patent is titled, "FOLDABLE ELECTRONIC DEVICE HAVING ROTATABLE CAMERA AND METHOD FOR CAPTURING IMAGES THEREBY."
Sonos may be looking smaller for an upcoming audio product launch, with a new Sonos earbuds design seemingly previewed by US patent filings. The audio company has recently expanded its portfolio, adding a new and more affordable point of entry to its streaming audio ecosystem in addition to a new automotive partnership.
Smartphone cameras are once again growing to an almost ridiculous pace once again and they are also growing in size. While there is indeed a huge market for smartphones with excellent cameras, not everyone might be so interested in those, especially if they're paying for expensive branding in the process. Consumers don't really have much of a choice in what cameras they get because of how phones are made but Xiaomi is once again looking into modular phones to potentially offer more options, presuming these actually become reality.
Before smartwatches became the portable health labs that they are today, smartphones were the ones that bore some of the sensors and algorithms needed for checking one's health. Samsung's phones, in particular, once had heart rate monitors and even blood oxygen tracking that it has removed in its most recent models. That, however, doesn't mean that Samsung has given up that idea, and, apparently, it was toying with the possibility of putting such health sensors beneath the screen of a foldable phone.
Apple has patented an iPhone design that borrows the Mac Pro's eye-catching machined 3D structure, though the distinctive aesthetic would be for more than just familial resemblance. Launched in late 2019, the third-generation Mac Pro studded its fascia with an array of complex ventilation holes, which Apple said considerably improved cooling performance.
In a patent application made public today, Valve showed drawings and descriptions of a new sort of VR headset. This wearable head-mounted display (HMD) included an array of features, including but not limited to wireless functionality, antenna, optical subsystem, IMU sensors, a dedicated processor (or processors), onboard memory, functioning operating system, applications, games, a head tracking module, and an eye tracking module.
Although it has so far managed to keep operating, it's hard to deny that Huawei's business has taken a significant hit in the past years. In addition to sanctions imposed by the US government over allegations of its role in Chinese espionage, Huawei has also seen its networking technologies and equipment pushed out of other countries' 5G plans. To recoup losses and perhaps to indirectly show how critical it is to 5G's development, Huawei will soon make smartphone makers like Apple and Samsung pay for patent royalties, the majority of which revolve around 5G technologies.
Sometimes the first glimpse we get at what future products might look like comes in the form of art from patent drawings. The art seen in patents certainly doesn't always indicate what the final product will look like, but sometimes it does. A new patent application from Sony has been published with some interesting artwork that shows a controller shaped exactly like a banana.
The PlayStation 5 didn't just usher in the next generation of Sony's gaming platform, it also introduced a new controller that breaks away from previous generations in more than just the name. For one, the DualSense changed the decades-old arrangement for the Japanese version, making it identical to the rest of the world. It also added more sensors and switched to haptic feedback in this iteration. It may have also broken compatibility with some DualShock accessories, explaining why a patent for a Back Button Attachment for the DualSense just popped up.
Although it seems that Samsung has settled for punch-hole camera designs, it is only a temporary truce in the battle to push out bezels. The ideal, which no one has perfected yet, is to hide everything under the screen. In the meantime, Samsung is also playing with other ideas, like the flipping camera of the Galaxy A80. The Galaxy A series has indeed been a testing ground for some of Samsung's more unconventional ideas and a new patent may describe one of the strangest ones yet.