As I’ve said before, I think Apple is more likely to released an iPhone with a curved display (the “iPhone Curve?) rather than a foldable smartphone (the “iPhone Fold”). However, the company has filed for an/or been granted various patents for both such devices.
About the patent filing
The latest is patent filing number 20220051622 for “electronic devices with curved display surfaces.” It’s for displays that have arrays of pixels for displaying images for a user. To protect sensitive display structures from damage, displays may be provided with display cover layers.
Previously, Apple has said that improvements to electronic devices such as smartphones be realized by investigating ways to maximize the utility of unused portions of these devices.
For example, the current design of most smartphones leaves the sides and rear surfaces of the device unused or at best configured with buttons and switches with fixed location and functionality. Since many of these buttons and switches have fixed functionality they can’t always be incorporated into third party applications. Apple says there’s a need for an “improved form factor for portable electronic devices which allows functionality to extend to more than one surface of the device.”
Summary of the patent filing
Here’s Apple’s abstract of the patent filing with the technical details: “An electronic device may have a display mounted in a housing. The display may have a pixel array that produces images. A display cover layer may overlap the pixel array. The display cover layer may have a planar central area surrounded by a peripheral edge area with a curved cross-sectional profile. From an on-axis viewing angle, an image on the pixel array is fully viewable through the planar central area and the peripheral edge area.
“From an off-axis viewing angle, the image is partly viewable through the peripheral edge area and not through the central area. To avoid an undesired color cast in the partly viewable image seen through the peripheral edge area of the display cover layer, the display may be provided with color cast compensation structures such as a guest-host liquid crystal layer that exhibits an anisotropic colored light absorption characteristic, a diffuser layer, and/or other optical structures.”
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