Motorola made waves in the smartphone industry with the launch of its all-new Moto Razr, bearing an uncanny resemblance to the original Razr but with essential upgrades to match current trends. We've seen foldable smartphones from Samsung and Huawei, both offering horizontal book-style fold, but Motorola did a vertical fold and got praised by the masses.
For Motorola, it's a big nostalgia bet, but there's another brand testing its luck with a similar design. It's not Samsung, although a teaser for the W20 5G smartphone confirmed a vertical clamshell folding design. Testing the new waters is a well-known name in the industry, Xiaomi, which has proved its innovations time and again.
Xiaomi's concept phone with a wraparound screen certainly set the bar really high for tech giants. The Mi Mix Alpha's design is on a whole another level, but Xiaomi is working on something to match the current trend of foldable smartphones.
According to TigerMobiles, Xiaomi got a green light for a patent it had applied for a vertically folding smartphone. In the patent, the Chinese tech giant has included sketches to explain the folding mechanism along with some features.
It's evident from the drawings that Xiaomi's unnamed smartphone will fold in half and a small secondary display will show information like time, notifications and caller ID. But it looks like Xiaomi is using a smaller quick view display than the one we've seen in Moto Razr 2019, which measures 2.7 inches.
In an unfolded state, Xiaomi's foldable smartphone looks identical to the Moto Razr without a thick chin. There's a slim bezel on top to house dual front cameras, an earpiece and a sensor. On the back, there are two vertically-aligned cameras at the bottom half of the phone. These cameras are placed in such a way that they cannot be used to take selfies in the folded state - sometime Motorola has done with its new Razr.
These are all the details we could get from Xiaomi's sketches. With the patent approved by CNIPA, we can expect full-fledged development of this new phone. However, there's no word on when we can expect Xiaomi's vertical folding smartphone in the market. Stay tuned for updates.
