Heretofore, multi-functionality has been achieved in portable communication terminals which perform transmission/reception of various types of data by means of wireless transmission/reception. A portable communication terminal is capable of performing, in addition to telephone transmission/reception and email transmission/reception, video telephoning, reception of television broadcasting, and referencing a website. In order to perform superior display of received image and text data, it is preferable that this type of a multi-functional portable communication terminal is provided with a display screen section having a larger screen.
However, if the display screen section and operation section are made large, the entire device becomes larger in the meantime, and this is not preferable in terms of maintaining superior portability as a portable communication terminal.
For this reason, heretofore, there have been proposed slide type and rotation type portable communication terminals in order to achieve an increase in the size of the display screen section and operation section while minimizing the size of the entire device. A slide type portable communication terminal is configured such that an operation section and a display screen section are separately provided on a pair of casings, and these respective casings are attached in a slide mechanism so as to be able to slide on each other. A rotation type portable communication terminal is configured such that respective casings are attached so that they can be operated to rotate mutually.
Some of the above types of multi-functional portable communication terminals have functions for viewing television broadcasting and referencing a website, for which a landscape-oriented screen is originally intended. In these types of portable communication terminals, there is a strong demand for the display screen section to be a landscape-oriented screen when seen from a user, as with that of a television receiver or a personal computer. Moreover, in this type of case, the operation section positioned on the lower side of the center part of the display screen section when seen from the user, yields the highest level of usability for the user.
For this reason, there has heretofore been proposed a portable communication terminal in which first and second casing sections are mutually rotated by 90° from the initial state, and then the first and second casing sections are mutually slid, so that it can be operated in a state where the display screen section is a landscape-oriented screen when seen from the user and the operation section is positioned on the lower side of the center part of the display screen section when seen from the user (for example, refer to Patent Document 1).
The type of portable communication terminal described above, in which the display screen section is a landscape-oriented screen when seen from the user, and the operation section is positioned on the lower side of the center part of this display screen section, is required to allow selection of mainly the two following functions so that specifically the level of convenience in terminal operation will not be compromised. The first function is a conventional function for operating the terminal from a closed state, which is the initial state, to an open state, which is the state of normal use, where the display screen section is portrait-oriented when seen from the user. The second function is a function for operating the terminal from the closed state to an open state where the display screen section is a landscape-oriented screen when seen from the user, and the operation section is positioned on the lower side of the center part of the display screen section. These functions reduce an amount of time required for shifting to the open state which is suitable for a function required by the user.
USPTO Backgrounds
USPTO Backgrounds