Why it matters to you
LG has always been a prominent force in making displays more flexible, and this patent shows the company is still innovating the format.
Flexible displays are all the rage right now, but LG may be looking to take things to the next level, at least if its latest patent is anything to go by. Check out this crazy flexible screen that bends over the top of your phone.
The patent, which was discovered by Mobilescout, doesn’t mimic recent phones with screens on their sides, it instead offers a screen on the front, top, and back of the device — but these aren’t three different screens in use. It’s one display that wraps over the top of the device..
More: Flexible LCDs will be available from Japan Display as soon as next year
So why would anyone want or need this? Well, jury’s out on that for now. The back of your device is generally what we use to hold our phone, so it’s hard to imagine use-case scenarios where we’d want to utilize the front and back of the phone at the same time. And, as The Verge notes, the fact that there’s screen on the top of your phone means that it’s more than likely you could shatter your display the first time you accidentally drop your device.
Still, the fact is that this is just a patent, and one that may never be implemented. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t cool — and something that could even be usable in a different form at some point in the future, possibly in a device other than a smartphone.
LG has long been at the forefront of development of flexible displays, and was among the first companies to bring curved displays to the smartphone market — beaten to the punch only by the Samsung Galaxy Round. The new patent shows that LG is only going to continue being a prominent force in the creation of the next great flexible smartphone.
