I would take the word “normal” to mean “the dominant form of the device,” to fully replace the current glass slab high-end smartphones. My honest view is that in 2020 and the near future, folding phones will still remain as gimmicks– they are expensive, break easily, and don’t have any main use. They are one small device that folds into one giant device or vice versa. It is just something to look cool and flashy. I don’t see them having any purpose for now apart from the cool-factor one gets as an early adopter. Will folding smartphones become a regular option offered by most manufacturers, or will it vanish entirely. It has very little chance of becoming a common form and here is why.
Most people have no need for an ultra-expensive and fat folding phone that opens into a tiny tablet with a crease in the middile in the super-easily-scratched screen.
Yes, some people want these. Maybe they’ll get good enough that people keep wanting them. Or maybe they’ll be too expensive and too fragile to become anything but a short-lived fad.
THE PORTABLE FOLDING PHONES
There certainly was a time when many dumb/feature phones were folding phones, like the Motorola RAZR. And yeah, that one’s coming back in smartphone form, at least if you’ve got a spare $1,500 down in your couch cushions. This one makes a little more sense to me, personally, as it seems to be more of a smartphone-sized device that folds smaller and more protected. But would I really be happy with that certain-to-break bending OLED display in two or three years? Will the hinges hold up, even when pelted daily with random pocket particles?
There certainly was a time when many dumb/feature phones were folding phones, like the Motorola RAZR. And yeah, that one’s coming back in smartphone form, at least if you’ve got a spare UGX 6 million ($1,500) down in your couch cushions. Most people have preferred this form-factor with the guts of the Samsung foldable phone called Galaxy Z Flip. This one makes a little more sense to me, personally, as it seems to be more of a smartphone-sized device that folds smaller and more protected. But would I really be happy with that certain-to-break bending OLED display in two or three years? Will the hinges hold up, even when pelted daily with random pocket particles?
THE GIANT FOLDING PHONES
We also have the likes of the Galaxy Fold, Huawei Mate XS that fold like a book than a phone that some people who prefer phone-tablet style devices.
And very, very rarely does that new thing like folding phones become the dominant form, this will take time. The flat slab with a touchscreen overtook the dumb phone way back in 2007.
But that wasn’t a change of form, but a change of device. Smartphones aren’t phones, they’re pocket computers with cellular modems. The most successful pocket computers without cellular modems, which had been dubbed by Apple “Personal Digital Assistant,” mostly because the early ones were not very capable computers, were also flat slabs with touchscreens.
THE ROLLABLE PHONES
We can wait to see more folding phones in 2020 and beyond we have seen a “folding phone ” form-factor by TCL which is already looking ahead with a pair of foldable and rollable prototypes that imagines what the future of phones could look like.
The images of the expandable phone (see below) paint a compelling picture of what the device could be, but when it was shown off early this year, they raised more questions than answers. The are not folding phones per se. For starters when the device is expanded the screen seems to stretch continuously from one edge to the other, which begs the question of where it goes when the device is unexpanded? If it folds behind the first screen then it’s going to have to bend very sharply in order to fit inside the smartphone-sized housing. The design also suggests that half of the phone will be left empty when the device is expanded since it has to be able to fit while the device is in its more compact mode.
Regardless of how far away this expandable phone may be from release, the images suggest that phone manufacturers aren’t done experimenting with new form-factors. Whether it’s tablet-sized devices that fold down to become the size of a smartphone, smartphones that fold to become more compact, or even devices that fold more than once, there’s no idea too wild to be off the table just yet.
We are still a few years away from when folding phones will become the new normal and I believe this will be affected by the prices, and fragility of the devices today. Buying such a phone today especially this side of the Sahara is a suicide mission with all the dust particles that can easily get in the middle of the hinges of the phone, warranty, or any other issues that can be a turn-off.
