Foldable phones

Foldable mobile phones, also known as foldables, are phones that you can usually fold in half. Usually, this also applies to the screen, allowing you to still fit a large screen in a small body.

Holy grail

Foldable phones are seen as the holy grail in the quest to fit ever larger screens into ever smaller housings. By folding a screen, you roughly halve the size with the only drawback being increasing thickness.

Foldable makes a lot possible

This design is relatively new and may be at the cradle of many new different designs. Many ways can be imagined in which phones can be folded in half. Horizontally like a book or, conversely, vertically like a notepad. A manufacturer can also choose to fold open only part of the device. Even before the release of the first foldable phones, we saw many different designs passing by. The fact is that it inspires many manufacturers to come up with something new again.

False start

Whoever says foldable phone immediately thinks of the Galaxy Fold; Samsung's first foldable device. The company gave some tech journalists and YouTubers a test sample just before its global launch. Some of these failed after only a few days. Samsung postponed the launch to fix any problems and to save the future of foldable. Indeed, Foldable is seen as the next chapter in the still relatively short history of smartphones.

Foldable's predecessor: flexible screens

Manufacturers have been fantasising about fully foldable phones for years. A precursor to this were phones with flexible screens, think of the Samsung Galaxy Round. This featured a convex screen. Still others also made the casing partially flexible, like LG with the LG Flex.

Still, it was mainly Samsung that did a lot of research into flexible screens and corresponding housings under the name Youm. After the Round, we saw AMOLED screens mainly under the name Edge with its characteristic sloping edges. Phones equipped with these were not flexible themselves, nor did the rounded screen have a real killer feature.