On Foldable Phones

Why though? What added utility does it offer? What problem does it solve? How does it improve upon the experience? These phones have fundamentally bad designs; not because of how they look (though that doesn't help many of them), but because of how they work.

The Samsung Galaxy Fold was a complete disaster. The new Motorola Razr seems pretty poorly built as well. The Samsung Galaxy Flip Z looks like a GameBoy and can’t really be used while it’s closed, and they’re marketing it as having “foldable glass”, which is clearly a lie.

Not only do these phones not offer a measurably better experience, by all indications, they’re garbage. Even the ones that seem well built break and fall apart, often in a very short amount of time.

I think we’ll eventually see foldable devices that feel like they’re truly more useful than non-foldable ones, but so far nobody knows what the use case is for a phone with a folding display. As of right now, all of these phones have a gimmicky feel to me. They’re strangely reminiscent of the phone I had in seventh grade, the Motorola Krave, which was a touchscreen flip phone with a completely transparent flip. Sure, phones like this look cool and they seem to be pushing the envelope of what technology can do in the present, but their blockbuster features arguably make them less useful. At least the Motorola Krave had decent build quality.