The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office published a granted patent for Samsung last week for a flexible display device that takes on the shape of smart bracelet using a flexible OLED display.
When Samsung introduced their Infinity-O display for their first foldable smartphone they presented a graphic that in-part is shown below. Infinity-O displays will be used for foldable, rollable or scrollable, and stretchable applications or devices.
When Samsung filed for this invention in 2013 it seemed like an out of reach concept. Six years later Samsung introduced their Galaxy Fold smartphone using the Infinity-O OLED display. All of a sudden a smart bracelet with a wraparound display no longer seems impossible.
Samsung's patent FIG. 1 above is a perspective view showing a spread state of a flexible display device having a slap portion; FIG. 1B is a perspective view showing a bent state of the flexible display device illustrated in FIG. 1.
Like many Samsung patents, their engineers stick to the physical aspects of the device and never commits to the marketing side of the invention. Meaning Samsung's engineers will mention a smartphone, portable information terminals and TV and more in one sentence but never commits to any specific device in the body of the invention.
Samsung keep the purpose of the device a mystery and describes it in basic such as: "The electronic or electric devices and/or any other relevant devices or components according to embodiments of the present invention described herein may be implemented utilizing any suitable hardware, firmware (e.g. an application-specific integrated circuit), software, or a combination of software, firmware, and hardware. For example, the various components of these devices may be formed on one integrated circuit (IC) chip or on separate IC chips. Further, the various components of these devices may be implemented on a flexible printed circuit film, a tape carrier package (TCP), a printed circuit board (PCB), or formed on one substrate. Also, a person of skill in the art should recognize that the functionality of various computing devices may be combined or integrated into a single computing device, or the functionality of a particular computing device may be distributed across one or more other computing devices without departing from the spirit and scope of the exemplary embodiments of the present invention." How non-descriptive can you get?
Though because we cover many of Samsung's patents we can show you other bracelet patents that did provide more details about a future smart bracelet or even smartwatch, depending on how they decide to market it. You could check out other Samsung patent reports on this device here: 01, 02. and 03.
In late February at the Mobile World Congress trade show in Barcelona, Nubia introduced a similar band-like smartphone to beat Samsung at their own game.
Vein Biometrics
The U.S. Patent Office also granted Samsung a patent for a possible future Galaxy Watch that will be able to read a user's hand vein patterns as a means of biometric ID. To review what the patent is about, check out Patently Mobile's extensive patent application report that we posted back in Q1 2016 here.
Coincidentally the U.S. Patent Office published a patent application from Apple earlier this month that illustrated how they may add vein biometrics to Face ID in the future.
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