Samsung wins Design Patent for a Foldable Tablet with Built-In Stand and Keyboard

Patently Mobile has reported extensively on Samsung's design and utility patents regarding flexible and foldable displays for tablets smartphones with dual displays for years. Samsung has been promising analysts that a bendable smartphone is just around the corner for a few years now and one has yet to materialize. The promising started way back in 2009 at CES. Once again Bloomberg reported that a bendable smartphone under the umbrella of 'Project Valley' could arrive in early Q1 2017. This past July we posted a report titled "Samsung Patent Illustrates a New Round of Foldable Smartphone and Tablet Concepts," that presented a nice foldable tablet idea.

This week the U.S. Patent Office published a newly granted design patent regarding yet another interesting foldable tablet idea. At some point in time Samsung will have to introduce one of these ideas or be laughed at for paying engineers to dream up stuff that they never plan to actually produce. I'll tell you one thing: if Apple ever decided to introduce a foldable tablet, Samsung would rush to copy it within a year, hands down. Why they can't deliver a single foldable tablet to date is very unimpressive.

Yet with that said, the following design patent figures were published this past Tuesday. One patent figure introduces a built-in keyboard in this multi-folded form factor.

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