Lenovo patent reveals a new slider phone with round camera

As per Tiger Mobiles, Lenovo has just been granted two patents. Each one is for a different variant of a slider smartphone that reveals the front-facing camera array.

Sketches of the phone were filed with the CNIPA (Chinese National Intellectual Property Administration) which reveal a new slider phone coming to Lenovo’s portfolio. The Lenovo Z5 Pro launched last year as the company’s low-cost offering with the slider trend that emerged in 2018 along with a high-powered Z5 Pro GT with high-end CPU and in-display scanner.

The unnamed smartphone duo appears to be from the same lineup. In the sketches, the seemingly inferior model has only a dual camera setup on the back and a single-camera selfie setup that’s revealed only when the phone is in the slid position.

The second phone is similar in appearance but has a couple more cameras. There are dual selfie cameras and a triple camera array around back. Interestingly, the round camera bump design is clearly borrowed from Motorola. The sketched device looks a lot like a Moto Z with a full-screen display with the form-factor of a slider phone.

Lenovo devices tend to mostly be marketed in China so perhaps we won’t see such a phone make it to western markets. We don’t have any specs along with the design patents so we will base the following purely on speculation. We might expect such a slider phone to be a successor to the Lenovo Z5 Pro and Z5 Pro GT, both of which were slider phones with in-display scanners.

They could each feature a 48MP main camera and use an in-display fingerprint scanner. It isn’t entirely clear whether these devices would continue the Lenovo Z lineup or create a new lineup altogether.

Several phone makers have come with slider phones of their own but the trend has slowed to make way for motorized pop-up selfie camera. With the Samsung Galaxy A80 and Asus Zenfone 6, the next trend could be the flip-around camera.

Source (in Chinese) | Via