Honor wants to take foldable phones in a weird new direction

If you're looking for wow moments in the smartphone industry, they have been few and far between for some time.

Folding phones have the chance to change that, just as Huawei recently did with its tri-folding handset. But, there could be something much more exciting to come.

A patent has been discovered showing a folding phone that will open in different directions. That (literally) opens up the possibility of a range of different use cases, because there's more flexibility in the design. The patent comes from Honor and was unearthed by 91mobiles.

What this reveals is that Honor isn't just limiting itself to the current formats where a device folds in half in one direction. Instead, the patent shows a device that would fold on two planes. Exactly how this would work isn’t revealed, but it looks like it will incorporate more hinges to provide those opportunities.

Of course, the question is why you'd want to fold a device like that, when you can just rotate your device 90 degrees to have the fold on the other axis.

There's one possibility, which is to allow the device to open with the screen on the inside and alternatively fold with the screen on the outside. That would avoid a hinge that goes through the whole 180 degrees of movement, by switching it to the other axis.

Given that the hinges would all be solid it's unlikely that you could fold it into quarters because you'd have to stretch over the increasing thickness of the device. There's also a big question of what happens in the centre where all the hinges meet - how does that segment work?

Very little is given away in the patent details, except that the aim is to enhance the experience of a folding device and be more competitive.

What direction are folding phones heading in?

There's no shortage of choices if you're looking for a foldable – with Apple being the big exception, of course. Folding phones currently offer flip or book style designs and it's only very recently that tri-fold devices have started to appear.

But, the future of folding phones may not be based around hinges, instead moving towards the rolling phone concepts that we've seen in the past.

There has been a rumour that Samsung could looking at a rolling phone with a screen measuring 12.4 inches. We've previously seen the Moto Rizr concept too, so these types of form factors aren't beyond the realms of possibility.

The bigger question is how much they'll cost and how you ensure that they don't get damaged as soon as they are out in the real world.