Samsung patent shows what to expect from wraparound screen phone

Image: theverge.com

A patent application spotted by The Verge gives some clues to what Samsung has in mind for the user interface for the wraparound screen Bloomberg reported last week.

There are a few boring ones, like slide-to-unlock and a battery meter at the side, but also some rather interesting ones, like ebook chapter bookmarks.

More below the fold … 

Email attachments:

Visual clipboard:

Various tabs – alphabet in contacts, timeline for photos and so on:

And multi-touch unlock, which seems a little low-tech compared to face-recognition and fingerprint sensors these days:

I must say I’m still a little bemused as to how you’re supposed to hold the phone while using the side panels. While Samsung will presumably use a variation on palm-detection to reduce the likelihood of accidental operations, it still looks to me like you’d be forever having to adjust your grip on the handset in order to use the sidebar controls.

I’ll be interested to see how it works in practice, but for now this looks to me like a classic example of ‘because we can’ engineering.

With curved screens looking set to be one of the next big things in phones, Samsung ensured that it was well-positioned to take a lead in the market by taking a 7.4 percent stake in Gorilla Glass maker Corning and simultaneously signing a 10-year supply agreement. The company demonstrated its capabilities in the limited-production Galaxy Round, with LG also known to be working on curved screen handsets.