Ayaneo, the popular gaming handheld device maker, has announced that it is working on a new smartphone with a sliding mechanism. At the end of its four-hour-long Strategy Sharing Session, in a segment called “One more thing III”, Ayaneo shared glimpses of its new concept gaming phone with slogans like “you’ll feel the difference” and “the magic lies in the slide.”
While the company did not reveal the actual design of its upcoming sliding gaming phone, it did confirm that the device has physical controls that slide out, just like the Xperia Play from 2011. Also, Ayaneo did not mention details about the phone’s hardware specifications, nor did it talk about the release date.
To give you a quick recap, Sony’s sliding phone patent was a design patent and not a broad concept patent, but its expiry seems to have opened the door for other companies to create and market phones with similar sliding mechanisms without infringing on the company’s design.
Judging from the smartphone’s silhouette, it looks like Ayaneo’s much-anticipated sliding phone may look like the recently launched Anbernic RG Slide, which launched after the patent for sliding phones expired in June this year.
For those wondering, the Anbernic RG Slide comes with a 4.7-inch LTPS in-cell display with a 120Hz refresh rate and 1280 x 960 pixel resolution and is backed by the Unisoc T820 chipset with 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage. You can slide the phone to reveal the physical buttons, which include a D-Pad on the left, two stick buttons and action buttons on the right. And while Ayaneo is yet to reveal how it will position physical buttons on its sliding phone, we expect to see a similar setup.
During the live stream, Ayaneo also announced the Pocket DS, a dual-screen Android gaming handheld that comes with two giant displays and inset sticks, making it the first dual-screened Android gaming clamshell to hit the market. The company also showcased a Game Boy-like vertical handheld, but like its sliding phone, refrained from sharing details about the product.
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