About half a decade ago, many OEMs experimented with the idea of smartphones equipped with a single camera system that could be used for selfies and landscape photos. One primary camera module that could do double duty. Following this trend, Samsung came up with the Galaxy A80, but behind the curtain, the Display division had way crazier ideas in mind.
Buckle your seatbelts. We're about to look into a wild patent application that, surely, will never translate into a real products. Here's the gist of it.
Back in 2019, around the time Samsung released the Galaxy A80, the Display division filed a patent application for a much more ambitious design — a rollable phone equipped with a single camera system.
That same patent was republished by the US Design Patent Office two days ago, likely for clerical reasons or who knows what else. Now, it's back in the headlines.
There is no other way to put it. The patent describes what seems to be an impossible rollable phone. It has a single camera system that moves from the front to the back of the phone as the rollable display does.
Needless to say, it looks like an impossible design that would require immense effort and R&D from Samsung to pull off — and even a camera system that would be extremely flexible.
Besides, it looks like a solution to a problem that wouldn't even exist for a phone equipped with a wrap-around screen. Such a display would allow the user to flip the phone over instead of rolling it. A wrap-around display offers plenty of screen area for the camera's viewfinder, regardless of how you look at the phone.
All in all, there's virtually no chance for this phone happening, but seeing this old patent application reappear did remind us of the Galaxy A80 era, when OEMs may have thought that a single camera system for both sides of the phone was worth all the trouble of devising complex, expensive, and maybe even fragile mechanisms.
Back then, Samsung and other OEMs were experimenting with flip and rollable cameras, and the Galaxy A80 remains one of Samsung's most unique smartphones. It has a single camera system that pops up and rotates to serve as a selfie unit. The Galaxy A80 wasn't a huge commercial success and never received a sequel.
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In recent years, these ideas of a one-camera-does-all pretty much died off. And it's probably for the best, considering how impossible some of them seemed, and how much it would've cost to make something like this happen for very little gain.
The closest we got to something revolutionary in recent years is the Under Display Camera (UDC), which Samsung uses for the Galaxy Z Fold series today.