After months of anticipation, Samsung and Huawei have revealed their all-new foldable smartphones during the MWC (Mobile World Congress) event. Foldable smartphones are the latest trend in the smartphone industry and every big company is creating its own version of it. In fact, Xiaomi’s CEO has posted pictures of its foldable smartphone on Twitter trying to keep up with Samsung and Huawei. This begs the question, where does Apple fall in this foldable smartphone race?
Apple is definitely behind because, as we previously mentioned, Samsung and Huawei were the first ones to introduce foldable smartphones. However, this doesn’t mean that Apple is giving up, quite the opposite. A new report from PatentlyApple is showing us that the Cupertino based tech giant has filed a patent for a foldable iPhone.
Foldable iPhone
Apple is not just creating its own foldable iPhone, but it will bring a couple of different features to the design. The Cupertino based tech giant is worried that a cold display might crack after being folded for hundreds of times and this is why its new patent introduces a new internal heating system.
“To facilitate bending about the bend axis without damage when the display is cold, a portion of the display that overlaps the bend axis may be selectively heated. The portion of the display that overlaps the bend axis may be self-heated by illuminating pixels in the portion of the display that overlap the bend axis or may be heated using a heating element or other heating structure that provides heat to the portion of the display overlapping the bend axis,” according to Apple’s patent application which can be found here.
Expected Release Date
Now that we know Apple is definitely working on a foldable iPhone, the question that remains is when will the device be revealed? We believe that Apple is not going to reveal the foldable iPhone during September when iPhone 11 is set to launch because as we can clearly see, Apple is still looking for the “right “design.
