Industrial commands for portable electronic devices including portable terminals have been increased as years go by, and portable electronic devices having various shapes and functions that coincide with consumers' requests have appeared.
Typical portable terminals, such as portable phones, include display portions for displaying images or pictures thereon, and even portable terminals added with functions capable of viewing TV broadcasts through such display portions or visually obtaining various kinds of information using wired/wireless internet have appeared.
Further, various types of portable terminals, such as a folder type, slide type, and bar type, have been developed in accordance with consumers' requests and functional features of the portable terminals.
Here, a folder type terminal means a terminal in which two bodies having liquid crystal screens formed thereon are hinge-operated to be unfolded in order to extend an available surface area, and has been continuously developed due to its superior structural features.
Recently, with the development of thin film liquid crystal technology and miniaturization of other components, most portable terminals have generally been slimmed, and the demands for such slim portable terminals have been increased day by day.
However, since the portable terminals in the related art have been developed on the basis of their external appearances that are more suitable to perform communication functions, such as voice call or message transmission, it is somewhat inconvenient to use them for multimedia services. For example, since the display devices of the general portable terminals are configured to be long in the vertical direction, it is inconvenient for users to view digital multimedia broadcasts or moving image files through such vertically long display devices.
In order to solve this problem, Korean Registered Patent No. 10-0909713, which is a registered patent granted to the inventors of the present invention, discloses “Hinge Device for Portable Terminal”. In an exemplary embodiment of this invention, in order to solve the above-described problem, the hinge device for a portable terminal is configured to rotate a cover of the portable terminal by a reference open angle and 360° in up-and-down direction while ultimately seeking the structural stability of the overall device.
According to the invention of Korean Registered Patent No. 10-0909713, user convenience can be improved, and consumers' desires to use the display portion of the portable terminal in a relatively wide range can be satisfied. However, it still leaves room for improvement, and there is a need for the development of a new type hinge device and an electronic device using the same.
For example, in order to satisfy consumer needs for a large display screen even in a small-sized electronic device, it is required to provide an electronic device in which both two bodies that are hinge-rotated are provided with liquid crystal display screens formed thereon, and if the electronic device is unfolded, the two liquid crystal display screens are combined to form one large screen. Accordingly, it is also required to develop a hinge device that fits the required electronic device.
The inventor of the present invention has filed Korean Patent Application No. 10-2011-0047360 “Hinge Device and Portable Electronic Device Having the Same”, which has been granted to registration.