I was thinking gimmick for a while, but my girlfriend has a ZFold now, and it’s pretty awesome. I think folds are a natural next step. If they are still alive and kicking during my next upgrade I’ll be getting one.
Until we get to the point where I can completely fold my phone into a ring around one of my wrists without it breaking, I don’t see a need for a folding phone. It feels more like a gimmick to sell a device more than a useful feature, to me at least
I love my foldable phone. I’m never going to go back to non-folding phones. The convenience is incredible for reading; websites or books. Also, the dual app capabilities is super useful. I can have onenote open with a website open on the other side so I can take notes, etc.
Budy, all I want is a linux phone without a bunch of proprietary, binary blobs that aren’t supported after 2 years, and a thick, replaceable battery that lasts me 3-5 days on average with daily usage.
With the amount of money they are dumping into these gimmicks, they could instead be significantly changing the market by improving ARM or RISC-V linux and making highly portable computers that fit in your pocket and that you can just plug into a screen where you go. They could merge the mobile gaming market with that of the desktop and console market that way for example. One unified OS with the same APIs and frameworks and whole host of native programming languages.
They could rival laptop manufacturers with their low-power, portable devices. Or even enter the OS market that way by providing a linux distro that they can sell and maintain.
I dunno… just anything but these damn foldables.
You will never get that battery if it makes the device thicker. I was in the industry, we made smartphones with a two day battery. Full on thick, in direct response to customers asking.
None sold. Period. It was something like 8-10mm thicker.
Everyone looked at the one with the thick battery then the thin and bought that.
Motorola makes phones with two day batteries (5000 mAh standard, some going up to 6000 mAh) and their market share is growing, recently reaching third place in the US behind Apple and Samsung. And it’s all in the standard size, forget being 8-10mm thicker, they’re 8-10mm total.
Purism made the Librem 5. It’s a chonker and has bad battery life and they only sold a few thousand units. However, if rappers can make dumb phones and sell out 10k units in a few days, I dare say there’s a market for thick phones with good batteries, it’s just that rappers and celebs do better marketing and have a wider audience.
Fuck no.