There have probably been instances where you had wished you could just prop up your smartphone and view some media content without having to hold on to the phone. It would be great if smartphones would come with built-in kickstands, but that would mean compromising on the design – no one wants a metal or glass phone with a kickstand sticking out at the back, do they?

Well, Samsung might be working on a solution for this, at least for the Galaxy Note lineup. One of the Korean giant’s patent applications – discovered by Patently Mobile – shows how the S Pen on a Galaxy Note could be made to double up as a stand. It’s a neat idea for a smartphone lineup that is partly aimed at media consumption – the S Pen will bend at a point somewhere near the middle at different angles and let the device stand up in landscape, letting users enjoy the content on the screen without holding on to their Galaxy Note.

As Patently Mobile notes, the mechanism will work in such a way that the S Pen gets locked inside the phone when the stand is used – the lock is disengaged when the pen is bent back into a single piece, after which the user can take out the S Pen for regular stylus usage or slot it inside the phone. After the special case that could bring the S Pen to every smartphone, this is yet another interesting experiment on the stylus. It’s also a sign Samsung isn’t yet ready to put an end to the Galaxy Note lineup, as it continues to work on making the S Pen more useful and accessible than it currently is.

What do you think about the S Pen doubling up as a kickstand?

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