Despite all the state-of-the-art technology that it packs, the modern-day smartphone is still susceptible to drops. One accidental tumble on your $1,000 beast can set you back by up to half that amount. Mysmartprice has managed to get their hands on Oppo’s latest patent, which reveals that the company may finally have a solution for people with butterfingers. Oppo intends to prevent broken displays by retracting the display inside the smartphone’s frame before an impending impact.
Oppo’s patent application can potentially make the modern smartphone even smarter by enabling it to sense an impending fall and brace for impact by retracting the display a few millimetres within the smartphone. As a result, Instead of a broken screen, the worst one can end up with is a few kinks on the chassis.
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Oppo’s Innovating Smartphone Patent Might Result In Broken Displays Becoming A Thing Of The Past
The patent involves using the robust metal frame of the smartphone to protect the relatively fragile display from impact during an accidental drop. The protruding smartphone chassis will absorb the impact and prevent the recessed display from coming in harm’s way. The document details all manners of flat, 2.5D, and curved wraparound display options that look and feel like any other smartphone, while still packing an elaborate hidden mechanism that can automatically retract the display within the frame right before impact.
The term ‘driving unit’ used within the document talks about a spring-loaded mechanism which is controlled by a sensor array consisting of gravity sensors that could detect when the phone is in a ‘free fall state’ and trigger before impact.
The filing also details how the display retracted into the chassis following an accidental fall could be reset back into its original position after a pre-set delay. The added protection, however, may add a few millimeters of thickness to your smartphone, which should be fine by most people. It will, without doubt, look better than some of the god-awful ‘armoured cases’ available in the market. It’s good to see Chinese OEMs innovating at a time when their western counterparts are mostly about optimisations and incremental upgrades.
