Samsung is known far and wide for the innovation it brings to its devices. Continuing the tradition, the South Korean is apparently working on a dual-OS smartphone-notebook hybrid that is basically a laptop, which also features a dock for a phablet as per a recent patent granted to Samsung by USPTO.
The idea while similar to that of the Asus PadFone-Smartphone-Tablet Hybrid, takes things to a whole new level, popping in a bunch of surprises and making it Samsung’s own.
The dock for one, serves several purposes — most importantly, once you place you phablet on the dock, the Android device can run other operating systems such as Windows, with the dock providing what we can call a brain-boost.
What’s more, as per a report by Patently Mobile, the hybrid device will be also able to charge the smartphone when it is connected to the notebook via dock, a feature which is going to come in extremely handy.
According to the images included with the patent application, the dock will be placed right above the keyboard, directly under the display which means that not only the notebook keyboards will be a bit cramped, but the beloved touchpad will also be absent. However fear not, for the patent also refers to usage of the smartphone’s display as a touchpad for the notebook.
According to the description provided by Samsung in the patent “Herein, the first operating system may be Android, and the second operating system may be Windows.” Also “The operating program may include the first operating system and the second operating system. Specifically, the first operating system may be an Android operating system which is driven in a smart phone, etc., and the second operating system may be a Windows operating system which is driven in a notebook PC, a desktop PC, etc.”
Incidentally, this would also coincide with Samsung’s tie-up with Microsoft according to which the Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge come pre-loaded with certain windows applications. From looking at the way the wind’s blowing, it seems like other upcoming devices from Samsung — such as the Galaxy Note 5 — may also be covered under the terms of the agreement.
Strangely though, basic components such as hard disk and processor will be missing and in fact, the BIOS will be on the paired smartphone as well — apparently for weight reduction purposes — making it seem like the Notebook will need the smartphone to work at all.
Well, there certainly are a lot of ifs and buts present in this new scheme but then again, this does seem to be the good times for Samsung. Let’s see if the South Korean company manages to pull this off as well.
More on this as we get it.
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