Samsung's Latest Patent Shows How a Phone Screen Can Be Rigid and Flexible at Once

By Patentlyze Team · Updated Jun 19, 2026

Samsung is working on a phone that folds twice — not once — and the most interesting part isn't the extra fold. It's how the glass screen manages to stay rigid in some spots and flex in others, simultaneously.

What Samsung's three-panel folding screen actually does

Imagine a phone that unfolds like a trifold brochure — three flat panels connected by two hinges. That's the basic idea behind this Samsung patent. Most foldable phones today bend once, in the middle. This design bends in two places, giving you a much larger screen when fully open.

The tricky part is the glass. Glass isn't naturally flexible, but Samsung's patent describes a specially engineered glass cover that has flat zones where the panels sit and dedicated bending zones right at the hinges. Between the second and third panels, there's even a fourth flat section tucked inside the larger hinge — an extra strip of glass that stays rigid while the device is folding, with parts of it overlapping as the hinge closes.

The two hinges aren't the same size, either — the second one is noticeably wider, which is what makes room for that extra internal glass section. It's an unusual structural choice, and it hints at how much engineering goes into making a piece of glass survive thousands of folds without cracking.

How the glass cover manages four separate zones across two hinges

The patent describes an electronic device — almost certainly a smartphone — built around a triple-panel foldable housing. Three rigid housing sections (first, second, and third) are connected by two hinges. The first hinge is narrower; the second is wider. A single flexible display panel runs continuously across all three sections and both hinges.

On top of that flexible panel sits a glass cover engineered to handle two distinct fold points. The glass is divided into seven named zones:

• Three flat (planar) portions — one over each rigid housing panel. These stay essentially flat at all times.
• Two bending (non-planar) portions at the outer edges of the wider second hinge — these flex as the second and third panels rotate relative to each other.
• One bending portion at the first hinge — flexes as the first and second panels rotate.
• A fourth flat portion tucked inside the second hinge, between the two bending zones — this section stays flat even during folding, but overlaps with adjacent glass as the device closes.

The asymmetry between the two hinges — one narrow, one wide — is load-bearing to this design. The wider hinge needs extra internal real estate to house that fourth flat glass section and manage the geometry of two bending zones converging on one hinge body.

What this means for the future of foldable phone screens

Foldable phones have mostly gotten away with plastic display covers because glass cracks too easily when bent repeatedly. Samsung's Galaxy Z Fold and Z Flip lines use ultra-thin glass, but the crease is still a known weak point. A two-hinge design multiplies that problem — you now have two spots where glass is asked to flex, and one of them has a more complex geometry than anything in current consumer devices.

If Samsung can make this work reliably, it opens the door to a device that gives you tablet-scale screen real estate while still fitting in a pocket. That's been the holy grail of foldables for years. The engineering detail in this patent — especially the fourth flat section inside the hinge — suggests Samsung is thinking carefully about where stress concentrates in a two-fold design, not just whether folding is possible at all.

Editorial commentary on a publicly published patent application. Not legal advice.