Why the foldable smartphone is an idea bent out of shape
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In many places around the world, technology is taking up lots of responsibilities and fascinating modifications. Before screen bending phones even hit the market, there has been a consistent progression in the quality of smartphones being produced by major companies. If one were to look far back enough to find where this all began, they’d find themselves at Apple’s “MacWorld” keynote on Jan. 7, 2007. The infamous Steve Jobs described this, at the time, revolutionary device as “an iPod, a phone, and an Internet communicator”. These 3 words are what set the standard for the smartphone industry, minus the iPod part since we now have streaming services.
The purpose of this article is not to relay the tale of how Apple is practically dominating the smartphone industry, but how each company’s leap of faith in the name of innovation has entirely changed the landscape to what we see today. So, what is it we see now? Well, the simplest explanation would be the fact that all modern smartphones are like glass, aluminum and even plastic sandwiches. Meaning that the phone has a screen on top, along with important parts in the middle, and the camera in the back.
This design first began dominating the market once the iPhone 6 landed in customers’ hands. Apple and many other companies have been continually making moves to make their phones more slender to appeal to a broader audience. They’ve made it slimmer by making the actual display thinner, obtaining smaller internals, and even removing the notable headphone jack. They could even go as far as to sacrifice a bigger battery life to achieve a slicker look with a smaller power source. This is the vision that smartphone producers have been competing over for a long time. This has led to the creation of curved displays on Samsung phones and even that pesky little notch on the most recent iPhones. Whatever people might think of these technological innovations, there is only room for them to be improved upon.
Ideas, like placing the front camera under a thin display, have been experimented with so as to remove the need for any interruption on the front of the phone. If you think that is a little odd, more and more companies have been experimenting with the practicality of reintroducing the fingerprint sensor by adding it under the display as well. This works in one of two ways. One would be if part of the screen lights up where you place your finger, the light will travel back to the sensor to be read. The alternative way would be to have a vibration sent up to the fingerprint to be read by the sensor. These solutions for fingerprint reading are known as optical and ultrasonic.
In the long tasked effort to remove any and all interruptions from the user’s display, this places consumers in today’s climate. There are more options than ever to choose from if an iPhone doesn’t fit their use case. Does the user want something that gets the job done sufficiently or are they after the extra features that come with the more highly priced smartphone? The companies that have taken part in this dance have been met with many challenges along with successes. Brands like OnePlus have made it their mission to make a flagship smartphone that can fit a tighter budget compared to the rest of the market.
It’s up to the consumer if they are willing to compromise on some functionality for choosing a cheaper smartphone. However, it seems that there is one type of phone that is the most expensive and comes with possibly the most compromise. The foldable screen smartphone is one to be called out for its somewhat gimmick idea. People have been playing with the idea of a phone that folds in half for quite a while, and what they got in 2018, was the Royole company’s makeshift idea for that.
Beginning with the Royole corporation, the first commercial entry to the foldable device market with the continually updated FlexPai. Although it was an insane scene to see a device open and fold like a book, the shock will soon wear off. Not only is maintenance for the device an issue, but the support on the software-side of things is creating even more problems than a folding phone can even fix. There had been rumors that Samsung was working on their own invention at the time, so to see Royale announce this new project was a reassurance to those that are heavily invested in the advancement of folding phones.
It really is a sight to behold to see the phone go from a regular size to a mini-tablet in less than a second. However, as reality sets in, it is still considered an immature technology as of late. Upon the release of the FlexPai and even Samsung’s Galaxy Fold, there were many reports that the screen would break if the hinges that bent the display were closed too hard. There are many factors as to why a phone like this could fail. One of the biggest being its hinges. Dust was easily able to get in between them to create a malfunction that would render the device useless.
On top of the idea’s big design flaw, many developers just have not considered this device when crafting new updates for applications. For a seemingly top of the line device, the software support for it says otherwise. Because of the screen’s irregular dimensions compared to phones out currently, information can be cut off or not displayed at all. The measuring of the phone’s display is also known as its aspect ratio. While most smartphones utilize the standard 16:9 aspect ratio, the foldable devices use a much different 24.5:9. This is an issue for software developers because they have to adapt their software for a much smaller niche.
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Lastly, one of the most important deciding factors for people even wanting to give this new invention a try is its very steep price. Ranging anywhere from 950 to 1,800 dollars for the most recent release from Samsung. In the case of any phone, the price can and will affect how the product is viewed by the consumer. For somebody looking for a more reliable experience, shelling out nearly 2,000 dollars for a currently experimental technology does not make much sense. Especially if all the parts of the phone are not all that much better than currently cheaper alternatives. As an enthusiast of technology, I deeply want this idea to be improved upon because of the true potential in carrying a tablet right in the reach of your pocket. For now though, these phones have quite a journey ahead of them to be more practical for the consumer.
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