OPPO's scroll phone design meets the requirements of large screen and small size

The news that OPPO is developing a roll-up phone has been attracting people's attention since 2020. At the end of last year, at the Future Technology Conference, OPPO gave its own design answer - the roll-up screen design. Its newly released OPPO X 2021 uses an OLED flexible roll-up screen. When it is not stretched, it is just an ordinary curved screen phone, but when the hidden screen is pulled out, it turns into a small tablet.

The introduction of concepts such as foldable screen phones and roll-up phones also reflects the market demand for lightweight electronic devices. However, due to the portability of electronic devices, the size of electronic devices cannot be further increased, resulting in a smaller display screen size.

Therefore, how to ensure the portability of electronic devices while making them have larger display screens has become a technical point of competition among major mobile phone manufacturers. To this end, OPPO applied for an invention patent named "Electronic Device" (application number: 201911289758.0) on December 13, 2019, and the applicant is OPPO Guangdong Mobile Communications Co., Ltd.

In this patent proposal, a scroll storage space is invented that is set inside a smartphone to realize the scroll retraction function of the smartphone. Based on the relevant information currently disclosed in this patent, let's take a look at this scroll phone proposal.

It can be seen that the front of the electronic device is provided with a display screen (see the left figure) and the back is provided with a camera (see the right figure). The display screen adopts flexible screen technology, which can be bent and folded, so that it can have effective display areas of different sizes. The electronic device has a scroll and a drive mechanism inside. In addition, the shell of the electronic device is divided into two side parts (11, 13) and a middle part (15). Driven by the drive mechanism and the scroll, the two side parts can move away from or relative to the middle part, as shown in the figure below.

According to the patent description, the scroll is mainly set below the display screen, and is connected to both sides and the middle part of the shell in a sliding manner, as shown in the following figure:

It can be seen that the two side parts have storage spaces for placing parts such as the scroll, the limiter and the drive mechanism. The two side parts also include a sliding assembly and a top plate. The sliding assembly is connected to the two sides of the top plate and is used to cooperate with the middle part to achieve sliding connection on both sides. The top plate has openings on both sides of the flexible display screen connected to the scroll through the above-mentioned openings.

From the above picture, we can clearly see that when the two sides move away from the middle part, the scroll phone will change from the contracted (left) to the expanded (right) state, and the effective display size of the flexible display will change significantly. This brings possibilities to some users who want to satisfy the portability of mobile phones and other devices while also wanting to experience a large screen.

The above is the roll-up electronic device solution invented by OPPO. This solution sets up a roll-up storage space inside the electronic device. When a large screen is needed, the display part can be expanded to improve the user's operating experience. At the same time, when the large screen is not needed, part of the display screen can be stored inside the body, making the whole machine smaller and more convenient to carry.