A new patent application from the company has shown what an unusual device with a screen that wraps around the owner’s wrist might look like. According to Samsung, such a design would fix several shortcomings of the traditional smartwatch form factor at once.
The first such form factor of a watch, where the display wraps around the wrist, appeared in 2013 in an Apple patent (even before the release of the Apple Watch), but the technology of those years did not allow the idea to be implemented in practice. Now Samsung is quite capable of creating such a gadget.
A large flexible screen can fix several shortcomings of traditional smartwatches: you don’t need to turn your wrist to face the display; the flexible matrix can be made higher than current screens due to rounding, and therefore more content can fit on it; the screen can be easily divided into several adaptive sections for separate display of information.
According to the company’s idea, such sections have several usage scenarios. For example, the outer part of the display displays information that can be shown to people around, while the one on the opposite side displays confidential content. As an example for the outer screen, Samsung mentions a bus ticket in the patent, and for the inner screen, a YouTube video. However, it is not yet known whether the idea will be realized in the form of a commercial device.