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.
