Intel is ready with a new standard for tablets and other portables with foldable displays.
Amid all the hustle and bustle of introducing a whopping 12 new desktop and eight new laptop processors, chip giant Intel is charting a new course for an emerging class of foldable devices.
After looking at more or less collapsible mobile phones debuting in recent years, it’s time for the tablet to also function as a collapsible food.
And that development requires hardware that can understand, for example, in which direction the device is facing, but also whether it is folded on one side and functions as a netbook or on the other and is read like a booklet.
The possibilities are many, and Intel wants to address them with an expansion of its EVO standard for portable devices.
Lacks crucial support
However, Intel’s efforts also depend on the onboard software following suit.
And here, current foldable devices such as Lenovo’s Thinkpad Fold X1 or other future devices such as the Samsung Galaxy Fold 17 lack crucial support in the Windows operating system.
Here, Lenovo’s folding tablet has struggled to get Windows 10 to work, which is why the company has coated the operating system with its own software solutions to make the device work as intended.
However, Windows 11 should already provide better support, even if the operating system is not optimized for foldable screens, according to a user group on the forum, among other things.
Android development
While Intel is now removing the hardware-related brake blocks for foldable devices, Google is putting the finishing touches on a special version of Android 12 intended for tablets.
This will be released sometime in the second quarter of 2022 and will, among other things, contain notification curtains and interface elements intended for folding devices.