Surprise! Foldable phones aren’t ready for primetime yet
The foldable display has become this dream feature lately.
It has opened our eyes to the excitement of phones that actually look interesting - it’s what drove devices in the late 00s and early 2010s to be fun (with the Palm Pre being a favourite of mine).
And not only that, it’s bringing back the classics that we loved, such as the Motorola Razr. No joke, it looks amazing. A full screen smartphone in something the size of a flip phone of old? Sign me up.
But two things have brought the foldable revolution to a standstill.
Price - The Galaxy Fold came in at just under two grand, and the Razr is available right now on EE for a massive £99 a month. These prices, plus the compromise in hardware performance to make room for the display tech make for an insane purchase decision that no normal person will ever make.
Reliability - You don’t need me to tell you about the insanity that was the Galaxy Fold launch. And as I’m about to go into, the Razr doesn’t seem to be much better.
CNET did one of their classic phone stress tests, to see just how strong the screen crease on the Razr is and (spoiler alert), it’s not good news.
It survived 27,000 folds, which makes for just under a year average usage… Expect a release from Motorola talking this down soon, and let’s not forget the context around the team having issues with the Foldbot machine at first.
However, one thing that is abundantly clear with all evidence on the table. Foldable displays aren’t quite ready yet, and we’re clearly still nowhere near the “innovator” part of the technological adoption cycle.
Give it a couple years. Don’t dive in just yet.
