Samsung Galaxy S11 could one-up Huawei P40 with rollable in-screen camera

(Image credit: LetsGoDigital)

last updated 25 October 2019

Notches in screens to account for a front-facing selfie camera could soon be a thing of the past. Huawei and Samsung are racing to implement ways to bury a camera underneath the screen itself for the Huawei P40 and Samsung Galaxy S11 respectively.

According to persistent rumours, the two competing tech firms have already cracked it. However, Samsung is going one further by looking at what comes after under-screens become commonplace.

A patent application discovered by Dutch-language leaksters LetsGoDigital reveals one idea for the future of selfie cams. Not content with embedding a camera underneath the housing to increase the screen-to-bezel ratio, Samsung has filed a patent titled 'electronic device including flexible display'.

In a design that echoes the Samsung Galaxy A80 with its rotating camera, allowing for excellent picture quality in both directions, Samsung has patented a 'rollable' slide display that will shift the camera on the back of the phone into a spot underneath the screen on the bottom right-hand corner of the device.

Samsung Galaxy S11 rollable camera patent

In theory, this would allow amazing quality front-facing photos without any pop-up or slide displays. However, the technology is very new, so if the patent is implemented, a few bugs will need to be worked out during production – one of which being the need to hold the device in your left hand, or landscape-orientated, in order to not obscure the bottom right corner.

After phones ditched flips, slides and pop-out features in favour of the now-ubiquitous glass rectangles, it's quite entertaining to see how the drive for bezel-less screens are implementing tactile hardware features once again. For now, we're anticipating the under-screen camera developments from the upcoming Huawei P40 Pro, and how Samsung will riposte with the Galaxy S11 next year.

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Matt Evans now works for T3.com sister brand TechRadar, covering all things relating to fitness and wellness. He came to T3.com as staff writer before moving on, and was previously on Men's Health, and slightly counterintuitively, a website devoted to the consumption of Scotch whiskey. In his free time, he could often be found with his nose in a book until he discovered the Kindle.

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