This interesting new feature may just make its way into the Galaxy Note 8

With the sea of pain surrounding Samsung Mobile these days, a large part due to the overtly high number of exploding Galaxy Note7 batteries, the company must certainly be working to catch a break. And that break may just be in the form of the phone’s successor.

The Galaxy Note series has been characterized by that iconic S Pen stylus--the component that lends its user a far more detailed on-screen experience compared to the traditional finger-tapping norm that has grown to characterize the touchscreen world. According to a recent patent that has been filed by the company, they just may be adding a new feature to this stylus--a speaker system.

As reported by Patently Mobile, this patent details the working of a speaker embedded directly into the stylus enclosure, which is designed to function differently depending on the location of the stylus: when the S Pen is docked, sounds from the speaker in the enclosure tube would be transmitted through the hollow of the pen itself and emerge from a grille at the top, and when the pen is removed the sound would simply emanate from the S Pen enclosure.

It’s hard to imagine why such a thing would need to be done, but if one were to wager a few guesses this could result in somewhat better sound by utilizing the hollow of the stylus as a sort of a resonance chamber, and perhaps help implement better waterproofing on the device.

Either way, design advancements aside Samsung still has a significant amount of brand recovery to do in the face of what’s happened with their latest flagship device. Speaker-enabled stylus or not, it looks like they’ve got to first win back favour by convincing users that their devices are safe to use in the first place.