With more than 40,000 people working in its multiple research and development centers, it’s little wonder Samsung pushes out such a vast array of handsets, smartphone variants, and other machines and devices each year. With that many workers thinking stuff up, there must be a massive backlog of as-yet unreleased products waiting patiently to have their day on one of its many factory production lines.
One that could soon find itself rolling off a conveyor belt is a smartphone with a 21:9 aspect ratio display. Whether it launches as a Galaxy S5 variant (the Galaxy S5 Really Darn Wide?), or whether it even launches at all, is at this stage anyone’s guess, but we wouldn’t put it past Samsung, as the tech titan seems intent on covering pretty much every single design possibility known to man.
The 21:9 device was spotted by SamMobile in a patent granted this week to Samsung by the US Patent and Trademark Office.
As SamMobile points out, a screen that wide would surely see the Korean company marketing a phone like that at movie fans, though no doubt some particularly imaginative app developers would see plenty of potential in such a display.
If you think you’ve seen a handset in that shape before, or are wondering from where Samsung might’ve got the idea for such a device, you’re probably thinking of LG’s ‘New Chocolate’ phone (the BL40) from 2009. Aimed at “consumers around the globe who value unconventional thinking,” (yes, those were the words of LG’s marketing team at the time) as well as “the shape of the future” (more marketing guff), the widescreen LG New Chocolate is now listed on LG’s site as a discontinued product.
While you might think the design would be better suited to a larger mobile device like a tablet, Samsung states more than once in its filing that it’s for a mobile phone. Of course, this is only a design patent, so it could be that the company ends up ditching any plans it might have to build it, but like we said, knowing Samsung….
