Foldables
Need a foldable phone? Compare all available or upcoming foldables here. Check out prices with or without a plan and read reviews from real users. If you want to be the first to own tomorrow’s phone and are looking for The Next Big Thing, this is the starting point for your search.
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Foldable cell phones, also known as “foldables,” are phones that you can usually fold in half. This usually applies to the screen as well, allowing you to fit a large screen into a small body.
Holy Grail
Foldable phones are seen as the holy grail in the quest to fit ever-larger screens into ever-smaller bodies. By folding the screen, you roughly halve the size, with the only drawback being an increase in thickness.
Foldable Opens Up Many Possibilities
This design is relatively new and may be the starting point for many different new designs. There are many conceivable ways in which phones can be folded in half—horizontally like a book or vertically like a notepad. A manufacturer could also choose to fold open only part of the device. Even before the first foldable phones were released, we saw many different designs emerge. The fact is that it inspires many manufacturers to come up with something new.
False Start
When you say “foldable phone,” you immediately think of the Galaxy Fold—Samsung’s first foldable device. The company gave a few tech journalists and YouTubers a test unit just before its global launch. A few of them broke after just a few days. Samsung postponed the launch to resolve any issues and to save the future of foldable phones. After all, foldables are seen as the next chapter in the still relatively short history of smartphones.
Predecessor to foldables: flexible screens
Manufacturers have been dreaming up fully foldable phones for years. A precursor to these were phones with flexible screens, such as the Samsung Galaxy Round, which featured a curved screen. Others also made the casing partially flexible, such as LG with the LG Flex.
Still, it was primarily Samsung that conducted extensive research into flexible screens and corresponding casings under the name Youm. After the Round, we mainly saw AMOLED screens marketed under the name Edge, with its distinctive curved edges. Phones equipped with these screens weren’t flexible themselves, and the curved screen didn’t really offer a standout feature either.
