Samsung Does Not Have Us Hooked on Foldables

Samsung is the front runner when it comes to foldables. The South Korean tech giant is leading the foldable revolution and excelling. The Galaxy Flip and Fold smartphones have eye-catching design and note-worthy features. They are in no way budget devices but the features somewhat justify the hefty price tag.

Credit also goes to Samsung for voluntarily going through the growing pains of finding out how to produce a successful foldable phone. The Galaxy Z Fold 3 was a terrific foldable last year, and the new Z Fold 4 seems to be somewhat better. What Samsung hasn’t done — what no one has done, really — is make the case for why you’d want a foldable phone in the first place. And unless it can explain why it’s worth all the additional expense and sacrifices, we’re not sure why you’d be prepared to give up your current phone to acquire one.

What Samsung must do with the Galaxy Fold, and what the rest of the industry must ultimately do with their own foldables, is persuade customers that it is worthwhile to purchase.

Why Should You Get a Foldable?

The worst thing about foldables right now is that they compel you to make huge concessions on your most essential device: your smartphone. The Samsung Fold 4 is somewhat shorter, slightly heavier, and almost twice as thick as the Galaxy S22 Ultra. It’s also $600 more costly. The Ultra boasts a larger battery, improved camera specifications, and a 6.8-inch screen that can be used with a S Pen. When opened, the Fold 4 is significantly bigger, although candy bar phones are still rather enormous. Fold also makes a lot of compromises in exchange for bigger real estate.

So yet, the foldable’s only real benefit seems to be multitasking. When you open your Galaxy Fold, you may run two applications side by side, or even three or four at once! We all agree that this is a great thing. The ability to utilize a browser and a smart switch app side by side is preferable than continually swiping between two full-screen applications. And seeing two pages at once on the Kindle app is ideal.

These, however, are not only reasons for foldables; they are also justifications for tablets. So yet, the reasons for Android tablets do not seem to be persuading many people. While Android has improved as a large-screen operating system, and the Fold 4’s software is built on Android 12L, too many applications that are “adapted” for foldables are just pasting a gigantic sidebar onto one side, which achieves nothing. Others just extend things to accommodate the bigger screen.

Samsung has done an incredible job of cramming all of Android’s quirkiness into the Fold’s screen, and in general, it’s not that the Fold doesn’t function; it’s that there’s nothing about the Fold that’s noticeably better than the phone or tablet you’re already carrying around. And combining them into a single gadget makes them both somewhat worse.

We have been duped by a lot of efforts over the years to create a technology that can be and do everything. There were modular phones like Google’s Project Ara and the Asus PadFone.

There were phones that could be expanded from Essential, Motorola, and others. In every instance, they were subpar copies of everything that totaled up to less than the sum of their parts. Foldables are now trapped in the same place: enormous, bulky, costly phones that unroll into little tablets that die much too rapidly, both in terms of battery life and durability.

The alternative approach to a multi-screen future is to attempt to produce the greatest version of each device, allow people to select which they want to use at any given moment, and ensure that their software, settings, and data flow smoothly throughout the ecosystem. This is, basically, Apple’s approach: it will gladly sell you a Mac, an iPad, and an iPhone based on the assumption that they would all be used for various purposes, and then utilize iCloud and the App Store to make everything function across those devices. It may be more costly in the end — albeit you can get an iPhone 13 and an iPad Mini for less than the Fold 4 — but it has fewer drawbacks.

Despite this, we can’t help ourselves: we want the tweener devices to operate. Users seek a foldable phone that can function as both a phone and a tablet. It would imply fewer devices to charge, update, and transport. Still, we believe either the prices need to go down or the features need to amp up to justify foldable devices.