Are foldable phones useful or just a gimmick?

Your next smartphone may flip open to reveal its screen and fold up when you are ready to put it away — just like those horrible looking clamshell like phones of the 1990s.

However the question really is “Do we even want or need foldable phones?’ Companies like Motorola, Samsung and Huawei do hope so.

Folding screen technology is certainly fascinating and worth keeping an eye on. They definitely are the next frontier of smartphone design , opening up incredible possibilities for new form factors. These foldable phones open up from a normal phone size to a mini tablet. It looks extremely ‘unique’ and ‘cool’ to have a phone fold in half and your definitely bound to stand out from the crowd with one in your hands. However, foldable phones aren’t even half as durable as the normal looking smartphones we’re all used to. This is because folding phones rely on a flexible OLED , (a display that is much thinner than normal OLED panels used in our current smartphones) so that it can provide the feature of folding the smartphone into half. Thus in order make gadgets bend, manufacturers have no choice but to sacrifice some hardness.

Due to the unusual design most people would find foldable smartphones non user friendly. It really goes without saying that many of us may not feel so agreeable to the idea of using a foldable for starters. We have been using smartphones for quite a while now. And the new form factor may very well be a bit too much to handle for many of the simpletons out there

Furthermore, foldable have inferior specs and cameras due to the unusual design and they’re extremely expensive, usually starting from $1350 going all the way up to $2500. (Huawei Mate XS for example is $2499). In contrast, the flagship high end smartphones don’t usually cost more $1000/1200.

At the moment the sole benefit of a foldable smartphone is that you can enjoy a big screen that takes up less space in your pocket.

So as of now, foldable phones is just a gimmick and are sold for attracting the consumer’s attention. In short, there is really no need to buy a foldable smartphone in today’s time. Moreover, the current solid state looking smartphones that we own are just fine and in some aspects outperform the foldable phones.