Foldable phones are here, but it’ll take a while before they’re good

How excited are you about Android tablets, in general? How about a small Android tablet, smaller than an iPad mini? One with questionable app support, and an UI that will likely take some time to polish?

How about a thick, heavy phone with an enormous price tag?

Well, those two things are what you get when you buy a foldable phone. And while there is hope that these devices will get better with time, it might be a long time until we get there.

I’ve now seen (and, in some cases, fondled) enough foldable phones to know that they’re very, very far from perfect. Sure, perhaps the manufacturers can figure out a way to iron out the kinks, like the foldable screen being stiff or having a visible crease. Developers will eventually build apps that play nice with these phones. The UI will surely get better. 

But there’s no going around the foldable phone’s clunkiness. It’s a fat, heavy phone, or a small tablet. The former practically don’t exist anymore. The latter sell for less than two hundred bucks at Walmart. 

If you’re a mobile technology enthusiast, like me, you probably love the idea of a foldable phone. It reminds you of something you’ve seen in a sci-fi movie — a device that morphs into a different kind of device, depending on your needs. But the way this morphing happens in real life isn’t nearly as sexy as that fictionalized idea. 

In reality, you essentially have two sub-variants of the foldable phone: Either the screen folds inwards, like it does on Samsung Galaxy Fold, or outwards, as it does on Huawei’s Mate X and Royole’s FlexPai.  

Either way, the results aren’t great. In Samsung’s case, in phone mode you get a very thick phone with a sub-par, elongated screen. Royole FlexPai is just too thick. TCL’s concepts are, well, concepts. 

The Huawei Mate X folds the other way and it’s the most interesting device in this bunch, because in phone mode it’s a beautiful, huge-screened device with tiny bezels, but again, it’s not exactly thin when folded. There are other things to consider, though. If you want to take a selfie, you need to flip the phone around to the other side, where the cameras are. That will never be as good as just taking a selfie with a standard phone. And there are still unanswered questions about accidental touches, since the device has a screen on both the front and back. Still, the Mate X is the most promising foldable phone right now, one that I can actually imagine using on a daily basis. 

In tablet mode, these devices are small Android tablets with an odd form factor that you’d never see on an actual Android tablet (I’m not even going to talk about the upper-right-corner notch on the Samsung Fold). They’re too wide to use for phone things, like taking a photo or making a call, and from what I’ve seen, they’re alright (at best) to use for tablet things. Not exactly the best of both worlds, then. 

It’s hard to give any sort of final verdict because I’ve had very limited time with these devices (Samsung Fold I’ve only glanced from afar). Some, like Xiaomi’s phone, aren’t even past prototype stage yet. 

But one thing is painfully clear: These things cost a fortune. Royole’s foldable phone costs $1,300; Samsung’s costs $2,000, and Huawei’s costs a heart-breaking $2,600. Unless you don’t care about money at all, you will not buy these phones. 

My theory is that smartphone makers are well aware that foldable phones aren’t for everyone, and that it’s too early for them. So they’ve set the price tag so high that essentially no one’s gonna buy them. And if no one buys them, no one will complain. 

I get it. Smartphones have become predictable. The users and the tech media are pushing for innovation. Samsung’s and Apple’s flagship products have often been called iterative (interestingly, no one calls laptops iterative although they haven’t changed all that much in thirty years). Smartphone sales aren’t what they used to be. So the smartphone makers are trying new things, and the foldable phone seems like a logical direction to take. 

In some ways, it is. The advances in OLED technology have made it possible to have a phone with a display that folds, and one day, when the screens get even thinner and chips even tinier, we might have something like Westworld’s super-sexy phonetablet thingies. 

But it’ll take a while to get there. Kudos to Xiaomi for experimenting with a dual-folding phone, which potentially solves the issue of size; if done cleverly, this design could actually morph a phone into a decent-sized tablet. But folding the tablet twice every time you want to go to phone mode might quickly become a nuisance. 

My prediction is that foldable phones will linger for a couple of years to slow sales, and then either disappear or become a niche product — perhaps something gaming-oriented. They will not boost sales, and they will not save the industry from decreasing margins. 

I hope I’m wrong — I hope that the kinks get ironed out and that manufacturers somehow figure out a way to evolve these devices to be elegant, sexy, fast and reasonably priced. But I wouldn’t bet on it happening in a year or two. 

As for what’s next for smartphones, I don’t know if the currently dominant form factor — a simple, thin rectangle — is perfect, but it’s still a lot better than anything that folds. Even if you have to carry a separate tablet in a bag.