Ever since the first foldable phones were foisted upon us, I’ve been struggling to understand their purpose.
They’re cool, sure — and technologically speaking, they’re incredibly impressive. But from a practical, ten-fingered human perspective, what benefit do they actually provide? I’ve yet to hear a single unambiguous answer. And that’s to say nothing of all the significant downsides and compromises they require.
At first, I assumed the foldable phone fad was similar to other questionable-benefit smartphone trends of the moment — counterproductive elements like “waterfall displays,” cutouts in the active viewing areas of screens in exchange for smaller borders around said panels, and heck, even 5G — in that it was ultimately conceived as a way to make appliance-like devices seem new, exciting, and meaningfully different from their predecessors (and thus suddenly worth buying at a time when most of us are content to stick with our current phones for increasingly long periods).