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TCL is an appliance company based in Guangdong Province of China. The conglomerate designs and develops a number of consumer products including Television, Mobile Phones and a variety of home appliances. It is the holding company of Blackberry and Alcatel Mobile which are left far behind in the smartphone race and couldn’t compete with the likes of Samsung, Apple and Huawei.
Now, TCL has patented a smartphone design under its own name that suggests that the company is entering the Smartphone segment with the brand’s name itself. The Samsung Galaxy Fold has given a new arena to smartphone manufacturers to play around a relatively new concept of folding screens. Several smartphone giants are trying their hands to come up with a breakthrough device that uses the folding display technology.
TCL has patented the first ever smartphone design under its own name, that too with a removable screen that gives the user an opportunity to increase the display size when needed by attaching the expandable screen. The patented smartphone has a standard design with removable screen that expands the display to the left and increase the screen size equivalent to a tablet.
The patent design shows an easy operation, the expandable screen can be attached by the thinner lower and upper edges to the frame. What makes this design so unique is the ability to turn a standard smartphone into a tablet by a simple mechanism. The TCL smartphone design shows a quad camera setup on the back, while there is no visible camera on the front. There is no official name or launch date of the device available right now.
The design gives us a look into the possibilities that the technology provides. For now, there is only a patent and we do not know how much progress the company has made so far in bringing it to reality. Currently there are only a few expandable display smartphones from major companies, Samsung Galaxy Fold and Huawei Mate X are the premium ones. While Motorola is about to unveil its foldable Razr phone soon.
