The mechanism in this was shockingly impressive.
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So many tiny moving parts.
I’m in love with the engineering but will absolutely not buy one. It seems like such a large number of weak points.
They make awesome fidget toys.
My poor slider back in the day died too soon.
As someone who owns them, you worry for like a week and forget about it.
Had a ZFold3 and despite dropping it hard like twice a week with only a thin skin for protection, the hinge and folding screen was fine. Outer, rigid screen took a concrete corner and finally broke though.
That said I’m probably switching to the Moto Fold because GrapheneOS.
FMEA guy rolling in his grave
They do all this to avoid kinking or stretching the display panel, if anyone was wondering
Great demonstration of an overly complicated solution to a problem that doesn’t exist. Specifically, the need for a folding screen. It’s something that I would never purchase. Less is more in the world of high duty cycle mechanisms.
The problem did exist though. The problem was that the company wants to make money, but they weren’t making money. So they came up with an idea, however stupid, that they thought would sell. So they tried it and it sold and now we have highly complicated, advanced tangentially expanding hinges.
Had one for a few years but and it’s quite convenient… The issue is less the folds of the screen and more if you happen to hit or flex the device against the direction of opening, which causes the OLED screen to detach and fail
More for me /s
Pick me! I’m not like other phone users!
If you use a phone for any type of media consumption, bigger is better, but carrying a tablet in your pocket isn’t a great option. The folding phone is a pretty good solution. Now I would never buy one either because I drop my phone far too regularly to not break it, but it’s pretty nifty.
I just hold my phone close to my face for movie watching…makes the film look huge lol
I’ve got the same thought about airplanes, I’d never purchase one, so why even bother?
So you’d pay to use my phone?
I think my overly ridiculous point should have been clear. Just because one person doesn’t want to buy something doesn’t mean it’s a dumb product. Change airplane to literally anything one person might want but another doesn’t. Are tampons a dumb product because men don’t use them? Are baseball caps dumb because I don’t use them?
I suspect all those linkages and gears help them achieve a certain fold radius as specified by the OLED folks.
I’m happy that some people seem to want this idea, to fund sone really cool engineering. But the history of phones has been one of getting rid of all moving parts, and I’m happy with my plain slab of a phone. This is not a feature I can get excited about
Does anyone else remember the goal of being able to use your phone one handed? Pepperidge Farms remembers
Folding phone is “best of both worlds” in that regard. You can use it one handed “like a phone” and open it to use it two-ish handed “like a tablet”.
I can understand not really having the need/want but it seems silly to think one handed use is out the window because it opens.
Screens are already getting too big for one handed operation, and the main use case for a folding screen is get a bigger screen, with more moving parts
Every once in a while I think back to how convenient my old flip phones were and wish for something that small with a modern sized screen, but I can’t see that happening and I don’t miss hinge failures. Moreover I wouldn’t want to go back to thicker phones
I guess you could be thinking of phones with two screens so you could do basic functions without unfolding but it seems like a lot of complexity. It’s great if that seems useful to you …… admittedly I already bought into both a watch and a tablet so see less need for either a small secondary screen or a larger screen
