Oppo Modular Camera Phone
As the design ID of cell phones has started to change with folding and scrolling screens, the design of cell phones in terms of lenses has also started to be updated in every possible way. A new patent from OPPO recently shows the brand’s new vision for the use of cell phone lenses – Oppo Modular Camera Phone.
An OPPO patent showing a smartphone with a detachable camera module has appeared on the website of the World Intellectual Property Office (WIPO). The patent images and description show that this potential future smartphone will have a rear camera module that can be removed from the back panel and then connected using a USB Type-C port for selfies.
As you can see from the patent diagram, OPPO’s idea is to make the rear camera lens of the phone into a modular design, the user is free to disassemble and install the lens part to meet the needs of the lens placement in different usage scenarios.
The patent shows that OPPO accomplished this by creating a recessed area on the back of the phone and filling it with a separate removable camera module that is sized to fit in with the phone’s lens section, allowing for detachable scenarios.
The WIPO image shows that the OPPO smartphone will have a fairly standard design with a camera module capable of taking pictures from both the front and back. The camera module will include the camera sensor, a flexible circuit board, and a Type C connector. The description also mentions that the motherboard of the camera module can also include Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and NFC for remote communication. The module can also have a lithium-ion battery that can be recharged at any time.
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It’s anyone’s guess when a smartphone like this will be available in the patent, but a modular smartphone design like this would not only reduce the number of components needed for the device but also make a replaceable/upgradeable camera unit possible. However, it’s unclear how big the market for such a product would be.
OPPO used the telescopic lens design for the first time on the Find X, thus adding the mechanized operation to the phone once again and changing the stereotypical design of the phone, and this time the modular lens processing is an idea that the cell phone industry has had for a long time, but whether it can be realized or not depends on OPPO’s subsequent operations.