It's amazing isn't it that this product category has been around for nearly a decade and then apple come in with their version of the product on its back to generation 1. The whole point of Apple waiting around is so they can steal everybody else's innovations.
Comfortably reach all points with one thumb? Would that not be really small? For me that would be like 1/2 the size of a normal phone when I don't actually hold it but just having it lay on my hand (aka high drop risk). When I actually hold it like usual I can reach, with that is thumb, maybe 1/4th?
Yeah, I'm on Pixel 10a, which is ostensibly the same size as the 7a I had prior, and for that I give a real half-hearted thanks to Google for at least not making it bigger. I still miss phones the size of my s4. I want a phone that discourages watching long form content, and we're unfortunately in the opposite direction.
How much could it cost to design and mass produce a phone that's exactly the size I want?
But yeah, it’s a shame there isn’t really a market with competition. Basically all serious phones are already too big for my taste. I have an iPhone 13 Mini and that is already slightly too big and I couldn’t even replace that with a similar sized one if I wanted to.
The Unihertz Titan 2 Elite is surprisingly small. The Minimal Phone 2 might be as well. And they have physical keyboards — yay.
I love the clamshell form factor, but it should be two screens, not one delicate one stretched such that it will always show a crease and will fail after a year...
Yeah, man. Look at how well-protected those screens are when you flip it closed! I don't care what version of Gorilla Glass+++ you have, no one's throwing a smartphone in a backpack or laptop bag without good screen protection...
We're like 10+ years past the point where new smartphone features were worth something. Now we're back to buying new phones because the last one finally died, not to upgrade.
My phone was 5 years old when I got it second hand. What really would a new one give at this point? Just look for the supported device list on calyx/graphene/etc and pick one that fits your budget that you can get second hand.
I'm currently using a Samsung Galaxy phone that's old enough to still have an SD card slot. I'm dreading the day that it dies and I have to pay 10x the amount for 1/2 the storage capacity.
honestly just get whatever phone and buy a proper digital camera, you'll save money. i did this with music, cancelled spotify, got an mp3 player, now i dont really care whether my phone has a headphone jack for my iems.
I already have a full frame DSLR but the phone camera is usually up there for any purpose I take pictures for, not to mention the massive zoom range. Unlike the big, bulky camera I actually have the phone with me all the time.
I suggest the opposite: spend the money on one device instead of 2. I was also at the exact position of the other person with the S20 being the last galaxy with SD. Sucks that they squeeze users so much and they just take it.
If you keep it long enough till it wont work on newer networks, your carrier might offer you one for free. I got my Pixel 6 pro for free because my old Galaxy didn't support the 5g networks. I was forced to upgrade so they gave me the phone.
Some Chinese phones are interesting. I particularly like the ones with lofic camera sensors, or crazy attachable lens modules, but there are all sorts of niche devices.
What made them boring is the homogeneity. Like aliens designed them, have no idea what an actual human would want, but know they have to build one bland universal thing for everyone.
I want the Xaomi 18 Pro Max pretty hard. I record a fair bit of selfie video so being able to use the back camera for that with the preview screen would be dope.
The LG Wing is also my favorite phone of all time. I like fun phones. Unfortunately, fun phones don't really seem to sell very well.
...This is better than the results we got for the current leader in terms of dynamic range, the ARRI Alexa 35 (and, there is a factor of 100x in price between the two).
That, plus a gimble, means its basically better than any near-term phone. I'd already have one, but... TBH, I don't really do selfies.
The specific weird use case is making a quick short vertical video on my walk that I just upload without editing from my phone while still on the walk. They're companions containing BTS and whatnot to my high-effort long-form videos where I do use different cameras. The whole point is that it's low effort and low friction for me.
Gimbal cams (and many mirrorless cameras these days) auto-transfer recordings to the phone, so
it should be nearly as frictionless as a phone recording.
And gimbals are great for walking in particular, as they stabilize footage in a way a phone (and most ILCs) simply can’t.
Yeahhhh, but auto-transfer would be annoying when I record 1TB+ of footage for a long-form video. I'd have to manually transfer, which is an extra step, and I'm not interested in that haha.
Xaomi 18 Pro Max, while with a really weird name looks really beautiful & sleek, it's like the optimistic future frutiger aero phone, if I HAD to pick a smart phone & I had a thousand pounds to spare it would probably be that.
But I don't find the LG Wing appealing personally based on a glance, the screen thing just feels bloaty, I don't see the milage you can get out of it.
As for the Wing, I don't think another phone (aside from foldables) allows you to run 3 apps at once. It's great for multitasking. I often watch a video on one screen while texting on another. It's just great.
Depending on what google do over the coming years I may just go back to a brick phone and get a small cheap laptop with Linux on it to carry around for anything fun. Backpack with a power bank for mains voltage perhaps? Some low spec laptops have pretty low power requirements though.
I don't think I really get foldables. Instead of having a phone and a tablet, you can have one device that does a shit job of being either (the outer screen is usually a weird aspect ratio and not optimised for one handed use, and the inner screen is quite small as tablets go), but it also costs the same as just getting both. Oh and they're also very fragile.
I agree, having lived through the old plastic covered LCD screens it would be nearly impossible to convince me to give up my gloriously durable tempered glass.
I don't really get the ones that are tablet sized but fold down to phone size, but I do love my regular sized phone that folds in half.
It fits in all my pockets, it's easier to carry in my hands, the folding in half is great for using the flashlight and the camera because you can be hands free, and while you could have this on a non folding phone I do really like the half screen on the back.
I did break mine eventually after a year, but that is honestly pretty par for the course for me - and it was fixable. In its defence I am officially clutzy and drop things regularly, and also it fell out of my pocket at one point and got driven over by an SUV (and it still worked for another month, I was impressed. I dropped it one last time a month later and the screen detached at the fold and the hinge went askew).
See, I'm the reverse, I don't understand the phones that fold in half. A regular phone already fits in my pocket and I want to use it as a table if needed; usually for video content.
It might depend on how large your pockets are. I've been tempted by the flip foldables because I'd love to have more options to put the phone than just my back pockets. Though I'm not actually sure if the front pockets on my pants are large enough for those.
I like being able to open it up and read comics or watch videos, but still have it conveniently usable as a regular phone. I had one for a few years that I kept in my pocket daily in a very physically demanding job and never had any problems with the fragility. Only reason I got rid of it was because I'm done having Google hoovering up everything on my phone
Because I can't put a tablet in my pocket. Front screen is fine, inner screen is fine, big enough to be a significant improvement. Fragility isn't an issue if you're not needlessly rough with it.
Bro and you would fucking SNAP that flip phone down to end a call. That's the only reason people talked on the phone in the day. So they could snap the phone down at the end. Once we traded slap for slab there was no reason to talk on the phone anymore which is why we just text now.
When you bought it did a delivery guy hand it to you in your cubicle without anything else and then it immediately started ringing or was that only available with the 8110
I never got the appeal of bleeding edge smartphones. Then again I have boring life.
With computers, you have compute for working or gaming. Powerful phones are for media consumption? Is everyone really leading such interesting lives as they project on social media such that the latest phone features are a must have?
For some it stems from living through the early years of smartphones with single core CPUs, only enough RAM to keep one app open at a time, and interactions that were a complete choppy laggy mess.
Back then every new (non-budget) phone upgrade was a ridiculously big jump in performance. If you lived through that era it became a somewhat normal thing to do every couple of years assuming you had the means. I think many phone buyers today are still repeating that old behavior of thinking "OMG I can't wait to use the next model that will be 5x better than this old one" but truly those days are long gone.
Now we look forward to only slightly (single digit percentage) increases in performance. And most new features get back ported to older models so you don't even have a software reason to upgrade unless your model is no longer supported.
As someone who has a foldable, im happy that my ebook reader comes with me everywhere. Its also gotten me into comics when I would have never given a damn before.
62 replies
It's amazing isn't it that this product category has been around for nearly a decade and then apple come in with their version of the product on its back to generation 1. The whole point of Apple waiting around is so they can steal everybody else's innovations.
Apple iPhone duo != all foldable phones.
There's more out there, folks.
I just want a phone that I can comfortably reach all points on with one thumb without having to juggle it about.
So when foldables started getting attention i was hoping they’d make smaller phones that unfolded to have average sized screens.
Instead we got average sized phones that unfold in to a tablet. Even the vertical folding ones are too wide.
Drives me crazy how small phones died because "not enough demand" but a fragile gimmicky $2000 folding phone is perfectly commercially viable
Comfortably reach all points with one thumb? Would that not be really small? For me that would be like 1/2 the size of a normal phone when I don't actually hold it but just having it lay on my hand (aka high drop risk). When I actually hold it like usual I can reach, with that is thumb, maybe 1/4th?
Didn't one company basically made a GBA SP kind of phone, where you fold vertically to make a small square?
Edit: samsung galaxy z flip i think
Yeah, I'm on Pixel 10a, which is ostensibly the same size as the 7a I had prior, and for that I give a real half-hearted thanks to Google for at least not making it bigger. I still miss phones the size of my s4. I want a phone that discourages watching long form content, and we're unfortunately in the opposite direction.
How much could it cost to design and mass produce a phone that's exactly the size I want?
You want small? There you go: https://gadgetbond.com/bluefox-nx1-4-inch-compact-android-15-smartphone/
But yeah, it’s a shame there isn’t really a market with competition. Basically all serious phones are already too big for my taste. I have an iPhone 13 Mini and that is already slightly too big and I couldn’t even replace that with a similar sized one if I wanted to.
The Unihertz Titan 2 Elite is surprisingly small. The Minimal Phone 2 might be as well. And they have physical keyboards — yay.
I love the clamshell form factor, but it should be two screens, not one delicate one stretched such that it will always show a crease and will fail after a year...
Have you used a phone like this for a while or are you saying how you think you'll feel?
Yeah, man. Look at how well-protected those screens are when you flip it closed! I don't care what version of Gorilla Glass+++ you have, no one's throwing a smartphone in a backpack or laptop bag without good screen protection...
Wasn't the Surface Duo actually 2 seperate screens?
i was hoping for a vertical iphone flip phone so it would be smaller oh well
We're like 10+ years past the point where new smartphone features were worth something. Now we're back to buying new phones because the last one finally died, not to upgrade.
My phone was 5 years old when I got it second hand. What really would a new one give at this point? Just look for the supported device list on calyx/graphene/etc and pick one that fits your budget that you can get second hand.
I'm currently using a Samsung Galaxy phone that's old enough to still have an SD card slot. I'm dreading the day that it dies and I have to pay 10x the amount for 1/2 the storage capacity.
honestly just get whatever phone and buy a proper digital camera, you'll save money. i did this with music, cancelled spotify, got an mp3 player, now i dont really care whether my phone has a headphone jack for my iems.
I already have a full frame DSLR but the phone camera is usually up there for any purpose I take pictures for, not to mention the massive zoom range. Unlike the big, bulky camera I actually have the phone with me all the time.
I suggest the opposite: spend the money on one device instead of 2. I was also at the exact position of the other person with the S20 being the last galaxy with SD. Sucks that they squeeze users so much and they just take it.
If you keep it long enough till it wont work on newer networks, your carrier might offer you one for free. I got my Pixel 6 pro for free because my old Galaxy didn't support the 5g networks. I was forced to upgrade so they gave me the phone.
Sprint made me buy a new phone to ditch my pixel 2a, then never turned off the 4g network where I live.
My phone is a couple years old, but is a flagship. I bought it because I love emulators and ROMs, and now GameNative opened up my whole steam library.
That, and the camera are the big selling points. An older, cheaper, phone would not have 16 gigs of RAM, or a processor that can handle any of that.
Whether that's worth $1,000 to you is definitely a question.
Some Chinese phones are interesting. I particularly like the ones with lofic camera sensors, or crazy attachable lens modules, but there are all sorts of niche devices.
What made them boring is the homogeneity. Like aliens designed them, have no idea what an actual human would want, but know they have to build one bland universal thing for everyone.
I want the Xaomi 18 Pro Max pretty hard. I record a fair bit of selfie video so being able to use the back camera for that with the preview screen would be dope.
The LG Wing is also my favorite phone of all time. I like fun phones. Unfortunately, fun phones don't really seem to sell very well.
For selfies, have you considered a pocketable gimbal cam instead?
They're getting ridiclously good. The DJI 4P in particular has more dynamic range than most cinema cameras: https://www.cined.com/dji-osmo-pocket-4p-lab-test-rolling-shutter-dynamic-range-and-exposure-latitude/
That, plus a gimble, means its basically better than any near-term phone. I'd already have one, but... TBH, I don't really do selfies.
The specific weird use case is making a quick short vertical video on my walk that I just upload without editing from my phone while still on the walk. They're companions containing BTS and whatnot to my high-effort long-form videos where I do use different cameras. The whole point is that it's low effort and low friction for me.
Gimbal cams (and many mirrorless cameras these days) auto-transfer recordings to the phone, so it should be nearly as frictionless as a phone recording.
And gimbals are great for walking in particular, as they stabilize footage in a way a phone (and most ILCs) simply can’t.
It does sound like it’d be overkill though.
Yeahhhh, but auto-transfer would be annoying when I record 1TB+ of footage for a long-form video. I'd have to manually transfer, which is an extra step, and I'm not interested in that haha.
…You record 1TB+ of footage on your phone?
Well, IDK about your workload then, heh. But those pocket cams do record to microSD cards, FYI.
Xaomi 18 Pro Max, while with a really weird name looks really beautiful & sleek, it's like the optimistic future frutiger aero phone, if I HAD to pick a smart phone & I had a thousand pounds to spare it would probably be that.
But I don't find the LG Wing appealing personally based on a glance, the screen thing just feels bloaty, I don't see the milage you can get out of it.
As for the Wing, I don't think another phone (aside from foldables) allows you to run 3 apps at once. It's great for multitasking. I often watch a video on one screen while texting on another. It's just great.
Squints.
...I thought that looked silly at first, but that's actually not a bad design. Its way more practical than Apple's foldable for sure.
Calling it Apples foldable when foldables have been made for years is weird but yeah. It was great.
I bought a new smartphone because I wanted to escape US tech oligarchs. One could call that a feature as well I guess.
Depending on what google do over the coming years I may just go back to a brick phone and get a small cheap laptop with Linux on it to carry around for anything fun. Backpack with a power bank for mains voltage perhaps? Some low spec laptops have pretty low power requirements though.
Same, the "best" features of my current phone is the user replaceable battery and certfied fair wages for employees involved with making this thing
I don't think I really get foldables. Instead of having a phone and a tablet, you can have one device that does a shit job of being either (the outer screen is usually a weird aspect ratio and not optimised for one handed use, and the inner screen is quite small as tablets go), but it also costs the same as just getting both. Oh and they're also very fragile.
Cause I want a phone for pocket fit, but I want the screen size of a tablet.
I also can’t deal with the …. Texture? Of the screen. I want that screen to be hard hard hard. And a foldable… can’t be.
I agree, having lived through the old plastic covered LCD screens it would be nearly impossible to convince me to give up my gloriously durable tempered glass.
I don't really get the ones that are tablet sized but fold down to phone size, but I do love my regular sized phone that folds in half.
It fits in all my pockets, it's easier to carry in my hands, the folding in half is great for using the flashlight and the camera because you can be hands free, and while you could have this on a non folding phone I do really like the half screen on the back.
I did break mine eventually after a year, but that is honestly pretty par for the course for me - and it was fixable. In its defence I am officially clutzy and drop things regularly, and also it fell out of my pocket at one point and got driven over by an SUV (and it still worked for another month, I was impressed. I dropped it one last time a month later and the screen detached at the fold and the hinge went askew).
See, I'm the reverse, I don't understand the phones that fold in half. A regular phone already fits in my pocket and I want to use it as a table if needed; usually for video content.
It might depend on how large your pockets are. I've been tempted by the flip foldables because I'd love to have more options to put the phone than just my back pockets. Though I'm not actually sure if the front pockets on my pants are large enough for those.
Something that fits the pocket like a phone, with a larger screen you can read a book on is something very enticing.
But those things can't do either, and as you said, are expensive and unreliable.
I like being able to open it up and read comics or watch videos, but still have it conveniently usable as a regular phone. I had one for a few years that I kept in my pocket daily in a very physically demanding job and never had any problems with the fragility. Only reason I got rid of it was because I'm done having Google hoovering up everything on my phone
Because I can't put a tablet in my pocket. Front screen is fine, inner screen is fine, big enough to be a significant improvement. Fragility isn't an issue if you're not needlessly rough with it.
"Because Apple made a shitty foldable, it must mean every foldable is shitty"
The layman thinks apple is who invents all consumer technology. I love my Fold 7. I always find other phones to be way too wide
Man, I love the update to this classic.
Bro and you would fucking SNAP that flip phone down to end a call. That's the only reason people talked on the phone in the day. So they could snap the phone down at the end. Once we traded slap for slab there was no reason to talk on the phone anymore which is why we just text now.
I had a Nokia 7110 and the slide of the Keyboard Cover is a tactile Sensation I still yearn for…
When you bought it did a delivery guy hand it to you in your cubicle without anything else and then it immediately started ringing or was that only available with the 8110
My dream phone is a jailbroken iPhone 5, with all those old apps ported through time, with a flip-out keyboard.
…That’s it.
Everything since has been a downgrade for my usage.
I have that exact phone with jailbreak. It runs a dual boot of iOS 6 and iOS 8. It’s so nostalgic everytime I boot it up. I miss slide to unlock.
I never got the appeal of bleeding edge smartphones. Then again I have boring life.
With computers, you have compute for working or gaming. Powerful phones are for media consumption? Is everyone really leading such interesting lives as they project on social media such that the latest phone features are a must have?
For some it stems from living through the early years of smartphones with single core CPUs, only enough RAM to keep one app open at a time, and interactions that were a complete choppy laggy mess.
Back then every new (non-budget) phone upgrade was a ridiculously big jump in performance. If you lived through that era it became a somewhat normal thing to do every couple of years assuming you had the means. I think many phone buyers today are still repeating that old behavior of thinking "OMG I can't wait to use the next model that will be 5x better than this old one" but truly those days are long gone.
Now we look forward to only slightly (single digit percentage) increases in performance. And most new features get back ported to older models so you don't even have a software reason to upgrade unless your model is no longer supported.
As someone who has a foldable, im happy that my ebook reader comes with me everywhere. Its also gotten me into comics when I would have never given a damn before.
Same. Big videos are nice, but comics, ebooks, PDFs, and diagrams are what make it worthwhile for me.
As foretold in the ancient scripts.
I love my z fold, the only thing is the screen protector peels and can somehow damage the screen if you hold off on replacing it. Ask me how I know.
I've never really cared about the foldable fad, so I was not aware that they apparently have terrible durability.
Well okay, I'm sold, please let me spend a freaking fortune for one of those.