While Patently Mobile has focused on reporting on Samsung's digital devices and smartphone patents for years, the fact is that Samsung is the second largest U.S. patent recipient year after year and being a conglomerate, the granted patents cover a large array of technologies. Samsung wins patents for SSD's, a wide range of displays types, processors, wireless power charging devices, kitchen appliances, medical devices and a whole lot more.
In today's report we're going to present you with a major patent covering a foldable smartphone and two design patents covering a smartphone with a transparent display and another for new TV remote with a touch interface.
In addition, our report provides you with a list of 161 out of 180 patents that Samsung was granted yesterday by the U.S. patent office to finally give you a glimpse of what occurs every week. The missing 18 patents are design patents which we didn't include in the charts below.
For 2017, Samsung Electronics was granted 5,837 patents last year and Samsung Display another 2,273. On average Samsung has close to 4 times more patents than Apple annually.
Samsung Double and Trifold Folding Smartphone
Samsung was granted a patent for folding smartphones. Samsung's patent abstract about their invention states: "A display apparatus includes: a display panel; a deformation sensor configured to sense a bending of the display panel; and a controller configured to control the display panel, wherein the controller is configured to: control displaying a plurality of objects on the display panel; detect the bending of the display panel through the deformation sensor; divide the display panel into a first area and a second area with respect to a bending line defined by the bending; divide the objects into a first object corresponding to the first area and a second object corresponding to the second area according to the bending; and move the first and second objects in first and second directions, respectively, according to the bending."
In order to bend the display, the smartphone may further include a grip sensor configured to sense a grip by a user's hand, the controller may be configured to define grip areas corresponding to areas gripped by the user's hand using the grip sensor. The user must use the specific grip areas to bend the smartphone in various configurations as noted in the patent figures presented below.
Samsung's patent was originally filed for in Q4 2015 and granted today by USPTO.
Samsung Wins Design Patent for a Smartphone with a Transparent Display
On March 30th Patently Apple posted a report titled "Both Apple and Samsung are working on Devices that will use transparent displays & support Augmented Reality.
Clearly Samsung has had the lead in the area of transparent displays and our report illustrated a few of their patents and a demonstration.
In 2015 Samsung presented the world's first transparent TV and mirror system as noted in the photo above.
Yesterday the U.S. Patent Office granted Samsung a pair of design patents covering a smartphone with a transparent display that is seen to be indented into the body.
Technically this could be used as a regular smartphone but double as an Augmented Reality display so that whatever you're looking at through the display could have AR tags and so forth as noted below.
The image above is an iPhone using its camera to view the buildings. A thin transparent display on a future Galaxy smartphone would be able to accomplish this without using the smartphone's camera. It's a great future idea until Samsung could reinvent the battery so that the design would actually be feasible.
Samsung Granted a Design Patent for a new TV Remote
Samsung's Granted Patents for May 01, 2018
In total the U.S. Patent Office granted Samsung 180 patents yesterday. Minus the 18 design patents not included in this report, there are 162 utility patents listed below in two graphics. Click on each of the graphics to enlarge the images so that they're legible.
A Korean tech report in April noted that Samsung held 119,337 patents around the globe as of end-2017, with the US accounting for 46,150, followed by South Korea with 24,860 and Europe with 10,509. It had 11,005 and 7,086 patents in China and Japan, respectively.
Samsung noted that it is expanding the number of patents in the US to effectively cope with potential technology disputes. I think what Samsung is referring to is increasing their patent portfolio to cope with the barrage of lawsuits brought on by U.S. patent trolls.
Patent trolls are companies made up of mere lawyers that make no products. Their entire existence is to buy patents purely for the reason of suing companies like Samsung, Apple and others who actually make products.
At the end of the day as you can see, Samsung is a major patent generator and at least 4 times larger than Apple on that front. Yet with dozens of folding and scrolling smartphone patents on record, not a single one has surfaced to date. While I believe such form factors may begin to roll out over the next two years, only time will tell if Samsung can hit a home run like they did with the phablet sector they created.
Patently Mobile presents only a brief summary of granted patents with associated graphics for journalistic news purposes as each Granted Patent is revealed by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office. Readers are cautioned that the full text of any Granted Patent should be read in its entirety for full details. About Comments: Patently Mobile reserves the right to post, dismiss or edit comments.
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