Samsung still hasn’t given us a good reason to buy a foldable phone
theverge.comI miss my Note 4.
Had lots of sensors, plastic enclosure, removable battery... Great phone, very robust, fast, did not need to be handled delicately.
Then they made the enclosures glass. Now I have to handle a phone delicately and with considerable care. It's slippery! Wants to slide and hit the floor!
Next move?
Get rid of the headphone jack!
After that?
No SD card.
After that?
No removable SIM.
Now, it folds?
None of this makes my life better. None of it improves the robustness and utility of the device.
I bet the first company to make a robust, plastic case phone with all the good features put back into the product will do well.
People want the utility and robustness.
There's Samsung Xcover Pro. Plastic back, 3.5 headphone jack, SD card, removable battery, dual sim.
I mean, 4Gb ram and IPS screen.
Why can't I pay more and get a flagship with everything? You pay more and get more features missing.
All they sell is flagshits.
Also rounded screens.
Just makes the edges distorted and the screen much easier to scratch.
Yes, though I must say I got used to the edges. Don't really notice.
Scratches and the difficulty of solid cases is made harder. Screen films tend to peel up and collect grime and dirt.
I'm mostly used to it too, but it's still worse in every way than a flat screen. Why???
Seems like it might just be a case of all the little downsides add right up without the curved edges adding anything to the experience.
We get left without very many options to work differently despite the screen actually working differently!
That might not read well, but I did give this some thought. It's an interesting question to me personally.
Say we have two experiences, a dial telephone and one with the little buttons. And then someone comes up with a dial that does the tones instead of the pulses. And this actually happened! Button phones ended up with a set of buttons arranged like a dial!
They sucked and I think the dynamics are similar:
In the case of the phone input schemes, dials were seen as slow and limited to numeric input. Nothing prevented a dial with more holes in it, other than being able to put fingers in the holes, but the design seemed optimal with just the numbers.
One of the real negatives about the dial was each unique digit of input varied in both the time required for a user to perform the input as well as that time being different per unique digit input needed. It's laborious. And it's all driven by the pulsing.
Buttons were a lot nicer! Each input took roughly the same time. DTMF tones are fast, as is the mechanical operation of the button. And one gets a nice benefit for repeat digits! Finger is already in position, making it a no brainer to work the button twice. It's not laborious to anywhere near the degree a dial was. It's driven by the DTMF tones.
One could look at these two cases and see that it's really about the tones vs the pulses, and from that insight a move to a dial shaped arrangement of buttons might be the best thing ever! What gets missed is many subtle things adding up to take potential gains off the table.
With the screens, Samsung made a big deal out of the edge of the screen being a new UX element that seems like a gain. One can flick from the side without much effort, and it can be fast, by way of one example.
But the negatives add right up!!
It's hard to grip the phone without triggering some actions. Disabling that stuff helps, but it's still a very smooth phone that wants to slip away and having less of a grip takes away from the confidence one gets with a non curved screen.
One thing I did was a get a beefy battery case for mine. It made the phone thicker and it put a ledge near those screen edges. I don't trigger mine in error much at all now. The phone feels substantial, I can grip it, and it's not slick, and, and, and...
BTW, you may really benefit from that battery back. I got the Mophie one. It's excellent, allows reasonable access to the pen, though worse than without the case, just not that much worse. Battery life is extended and I can operate the phone in ways that do not wear the internal battery as much.
It turned out to have changed the balance. The upsides have value I can benefit from while marginalizing the many downsides.
And that is my take on this. Worth what you paid...
I used a Z Fold 3 as my primary phone for a few months.
It dramatically changed my phone usage habits. The super slim front display is just slim enough to be annoying to use, so I'd find myself checking/acknowledging notifications without finding myself engaging and becoming distracted as frequently as I used to. I also found that when I was sitting around somewhere bored, I was much more likely to start reading an ebook than before, as the form factor is really fantastic for that. My reading habits have dropped back off now that I've returned to using an iPhone.
The reason is pretty simple. I want to carry around a tablet. I can't fit a tablet in my pocket, but I can fit a folding tablet in my pocket. Thus, I will use a folding tablet, such as a Samsung or Oppo or Vivo Fold.
Happy with the Flip 3. It is small in the pocket. I can check messages and new emails without unfolding. I can even do NFC payments while it's folded up.
Besides that, I can stand it on my desk with the screen towards me, which is very convenient when doing things on a computer and the phone simultaneously (like 2FA authentication).
Can't think of any downsides to a standard phone really.
>Can't think of any downsides to a standard phone really.
I think durability and price are the 2 biggest downsides people will face with a folding phone. A third might be software support, but I don't know if the situation has improved over time?
I think the wavy reflections and distortion along the fold would trigger my OCD.
And Rainbo hasn't given us a reason to buy sliced bread. Some things are just obvious and, to those who refuse to use their own cognitive faculties, Samsung owes nothing. The producer is not on the hook for manufacturing demand.
Dedicated Apple user here...I was in a Verizon store a few weeks ago and encountered one of these foldable phones. Was super impressed with the hardware. Really neat to have a device that functioned either as a palm-sized phone or could be folded out for a tablet-like experience. Lots to like! But, for users like myself it's not just about the hardware, it's also about the overall experience. If it isn't iOS and/or fits into our household tech stack, it's a non-starter.
There might be a secondary thing going on here too... I've had multiple tablets over the years. In theory I could use one as my everyday device. In theory I could take one with me in the field daily and it would be useful. In practice though, my current iPad is sitting somewhere collecting dust because a large-screen iPhone is "good enough" for those times I might otherwise pull out the tablet in a business setting, and when I'm doing "real work" I'm on my laptop anyway.
Interesting. For me, a device being iOS based is a non-starter, I just can't handle the limitations of the operating system.
I agree completely. I used to have an iPad mini nearby but once the phones got bigger I didn't really need it anymore and, like you said, if I'm actually going to do real work I'm moving to my MBP.
Apple has a long history of not necessarily being the first to use a new tech but the first to do it right/well. Of course there are examples of them failing/stumbling (Homepod comes to mind among others) but I'm very much looking forward to their "take" on a folding device. Right now it feels a little gimmicky and there is a potentially that we simply leapfrog that tech and use something better (AR?).
Actually I like having a smaller phone in my pocket instead of a brick so I for one will be looking at foldable phones once I am back on the cell phone market.
While I think thinner isn't always the best option, I think the foldables are a bit too thick.
I wish they would stop this. I do not ever want a foldable phone. That's just a part to break in a year or two and force you to buy a whole new phone. I had a sliding phone in the past that broke in normal use and the buttons on one side became impossible to register. It's bad enough that the phones are designed so that you can't easily replace batteries and such now.
The only thing holding me back is concerns about duribility and software updates.
Granted I haven't really looked into it in the past year or so, and I'm not planning on upgrading my current phone for at least one more year.