New Xiaomi patent: telescopic camera

There are no number of new Xiaomi patents, some will remain and not be implemented, but others will. Some are quite sensible ideas, but others are downright crazy. This one is one of them, the telescopic camera.

A new Xiaomi patent has just been granted today, entitled "Terminal device with tremor-absorbing camera module".

“According to the summary, the present disclosure comprises a camera module and a pivot point unit, the pivot point unit being connected to the housing of the camera module. The pivot point unit is capable of driving the camera module to move through more than four degrees of freedom, wherein the pivot point unit is capable of rotating the camera module in a first direction of the short side of the end device and in a second direction of the long side of the end device about the first and second directions, and telescoping the camera module in the respective directions. In addition, the same camera module can simultaneously capture front and rear images, which not only saves cost and space throughout the machine, but also eliminates the need to set up the front camera on the display side of the terminal equipment, allowing for a full-screen design of the terminal equipment.”

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It is not clear from the text of the new Xiaomi patent whether this telescopic camera module comes out of the housing manually or electronically. Xiaomi already had an electronic, or motorised, solution back in the Xiaomi Mi 9T family. Not yet manually foldable, or in this case foldable. I don't think this solution will ever be implemented as it raises more questions than it solves. True, this way we wouldn't have to use selfie cameras to poke holes in the screen and lose precious pixels. But surely no one would break it on the first fold...