Motorola wants to turn your mobile phone’s display into a speaker

In an effort to change the way you use your mobile device, Motorola Mobility filed an interesting application to the US Patent and Trademark Office. Stating that it has found a way to create a “usable audio area” out of the screen of a mobile device, the hardware manufacturer aims to turn the touchscreen of your smartphone or tablet into a fully functioning speaker. The design would allow the user to hear audio both privately and in speakerphone mode.
The patent describes the screen technology as a free-floating display lens that is affixed to the rest of the device by a “stiffener ring” that is supported by a piezoelectric structure. In layman’s terms, Motorola Mobility proposed a method to transmit sound using an electrical signal that is then made audible by means of tiny vibrations. In addition, the screen will be capable of giving haptic feedback when selections made.
If this technology actually sees the light of day, it could drastically change the way that mobile devices look and act like. It’s something that both Motorola Mobility, and its new owner Google, could use to pick up the sales performance of the division after the closing of a $12.5 billion acquisition deal last May. Traditionally mobile devices are manufactured with a screen and speaker setup that are totally different pieces of hardware — if Motorola could patent this new technology, then it’s not out of the question that consumers will see a new paradigm in device design.

A piezoelectric speaker

This isn’t the first time that a company has sought to make viewing screens a dual-purpose device. Apple in 2006 filed a patent application for a screen that had thousands of pixel-sized cameras embedded into an LCD screen so that you could be looking into the camera no matter where your attention was while you were on a video conference. The hope was that Apple would add that tech into the iPhone, but neither desktop monitors or any mobile device from Cupertino has come with that feature installed. Of course back in 2006, there weren’t nearly as many smartphones or tablets on the market as there are today.
As with any patent application, there’s no guarantee or timeline for the appearance of this new screen-speaker technology. Although with Google working hard to try and jump start Android from its recent flat performance, I would hazard a guess that we could see this patent see the light of day sometime in the near future.