Crease may be the Least Important Feature of Foldable Phones.
Xiaomi Mix Fold 2, it's weighted 262g, which is surprising for foldable phones
Try to catch some keywords about foldable phones in your mind, thickness, fold crease and expensive always came into my mind. It seems like making foldable phones are great attempt to define the future of the smartphone. It makes the phone feels premium and the price becomes reasonable. Commercial-wise it is a good move, it promised a higher profit and clearance of their stock of components like screen and processor. However, it didn’t go as well as expected.
Get hands on a foldable phone, unfold it, and the first thing that strikes the eye is the crease at the center of the phone. It made users start to worry if there is something wrong with the phone. A noticeable crease for sure would annoy users when they are enjoying the larger-than-usual inner screen.
Therefore, we are seeing manufacturers seek improvements. They attempted to make a less obvious. Later, the erasion of the crease became the main competition. Manufacturers critiqued each other’s solutions and brought new ones every time. Everything seemed walking on the right track, but it was only an illusion. Many special concepts and folding structures were then invented and developed for the sake of smaller and unobvious creases. However, no matter how manufacturers improve their skills in “origami”, crease remains inevitable. The longer you use it, it gets more obvious.
If you see the recent launches, you might realize they don’t even mention the crease problem anymore. The battle continues somewhere else, thickness. I believe thickness is another roadblock for us to getting used to a foldable. For many, it just doesn’t worth it to sacrifice convenience for some extra space on the screen. Most of the time, the extra screen sits in an awkward place. It is too small for some actual paperwork, users rather use laptops or tablets instead. It is also too big for daily usage, many apps aren’t even adaptive to this widescreen. It will not differ too much from a normal smartphone if you chat or browse social media on foldable. It feels like more of a burden than a benefit.
Therefore, unloading the weight is a good way of making foldable phones convenient, and smarter. Having a foldable phone is cool, but if the cost is the crease, weight, and thickness, maybe not so much.
The Heyupers also talked about this in the forum. The response of the Heyup community is, that they would rather wait for the experience and technology to get better. So, I guess everyone loves to fold their phones it is just not the right time.
If you have anything to add or want to share your thoughts, don’t hesitate to reach everyone in the forum.
