Honor planning to shake up the foldable market with something rather different

The best smartphones over the past decade all have something in common: the design. The flat slab of tech has been the dominant form for smartphones, with folding phones only breaking onto the scene in the past 6 years – and still fighting to make an impression.

There is another route to creating a different design of phone, taking advantage of rollable or flexible displays. LG Display showcased panels that could provide the screen for such devices, with its LG Rollable in 2020 – something that Oppo has also showcased, along with the Moto Rizr more recently.

It’s this approach that Honor seem to be investigating, with an interesting patent surfacing (uncovered by ITHome, via Neowin) for an Honor device that uses a rollable display to allow for an expanding phone.

The patent itself doesn’t focus on the display, instead setting out how it might support it, thanks to a clever backbone structure. The patent was filed with the China National Intellectual Property Administration on 3 December, which perhaps suggests that this is an active area of development for Honor.

There’s mention of an elastic beam structure, although there’s little else about how the device will actually work. The patent outlines that the support for the display surface would be better, reducing the “rib feeling” behind the display when using it.

What are the advantages of a rolling phone?

The rolling phone has often been pushed as the future direction for phones rather than the tri-folding phone that’s starting to emerge. A rolling phone keeps the extra display stored within the device so it’s protected when not in use and in theory could allow multiple sizes. That might be expanding just the right amount to give you a screen space you need.

It’s also a futuristic and techy solution, which is why rolling phones have an air of excitement around them. Some suggest that they avoid the folding-phone issue of having a pronounced crease, but there’s always the chance that a rolling phone’s display won’t be flat and tight like a regular phone.

There’s also the question of speed. A folding phone moves from being a small screen to a large screen in no time at all – a rolling phone is likely to take longer to deploy, which is just going to be time spent waiting. Then you have the issue of durability for the entirety of the display – so rolling phones face plenty of challenges too.

As this is just at the patent stage, there’s no telling when we might see a rolling phone from Honor – but it certainly looks like it's investigating the possibility.