Lolnein has great animated songs btw. Including one for this comic
Phone design language peaked with the Blackberry Pearl and we’ve been straying further from God’s light each day since.
The Sidekick was the perfect cell of cell phone design. I want it back and modernized.
Tech Demos keep showing rollable screens, and those look way more interesting to me than foldable
But all the demos are still not what I want, I’d want it to go from pager sized to feature phone sized
YES to pager sized phone!
I have little hands and don’t want thumb tendonitis
I’m more interested in it taking less pant space, but I am glad there’s others that want the same
Original gif:
Surely they at least thought about adding a thick border to prevent the screens from rubbing together, right?
The damage happens at the fold. Not sure anything can be done about that.
make a hinge that doesn’t break and take out your fragile bendy screen?
there is a korean video where it broke in the same spot, and the part of the hinge that broke was very thin.
ffs, every other manufacturer has a fold phone, and none of them experience this high a failure rate, this quickly too.
ffs, every other manufacturer has a fold phone, and none of them experience this high a failure rate, this quickly too.
We don’t know what the failure rate is, as of yesterday there were “at least 10 different confirmed cases”. And I remember Samsung also had similar issues on their first fold phone for example.
Either way fold phones are stupid as far as I’m concerned and never should’ve been invented. Just another way to part idiots and their money.
Naw the 2025 Razr is pretty much perfect, I got it for $165 at release.
how in the hell did you get it for $165?
are you sure you didn’t mean $650?
Bought a total wireless phone with a year of service and “upgraded” $25 at Walmart
ah that phone went a week without charging, which has as much to do with how much we used phones back as with how fast smart phones deplete battery.
Weird how my gameboy uses less battery than my tv
Your TV has batteries? 'Splain it to me Lucy!
This is the moment technology peaked
Oh my god, you old bastid! I remember those! I never had one, but I remember the 30 seconds they lasted!
It needs a battery-backup for the built-in hot mike, storage and wifi. What if there was a power outage and somebody said something exploitable? It might miss something marketable. Or worse: viable blackmail.
Interesting! My TV is old and doesn’t get used much. So thank you for explaining it to me. I have learned something!
If they weren’t a bazillion dollars I would love a tri-screen foldable (if it supported Graphene).
locally, it is cheaper than the iphone duo. although it is about 2 years old at this point.
I am talking about the Huawei mate XT. there seems to be a new one in the works though.
Still a bazillion. But where is locally?
It’s amazing isn’t it that this product category has been around for nearly a decade and then apple come in with their version of the product and its back to generation 1. The whole point of Apple waiting around is so they can steal everybody else’s innovations.
They made a “better” hinge. Apparently that’s what’s failing and breaks the screen.
Which is hilarious because even their ‘better hinge’ tech is just a copy of the OPPO Find N’s 3d resin smoothing idea.
What? The two processes are nothing alike, where did you hear that they were? OPPO is adjusting surface flaws in machined components by filling with 3D resin, whereas Apple is directly printing components from an amorphous metal.
where did you hear that they were? OPPO is adjusting surface flaws in machined components by filling with 3D resin,
Apple themselves, via techcrunch
“During manufacturing, we use AI algorithms to precisely match each individual hinge with its best-fit housing to ensure perfect alignment, and a confocal laser progressively scans the topology of every single unit and 3D prints up to 25 micro layers of a custom photopolymer to eliminate residual waviness,”
Their hinge is using the same tech, in addition to whatever other thngs they’d thrown in.
I won’t quibble over semantics, thank you for providing a source!
So did they not test it?
They probably did, but could be that their production process is faulty and the problems only popped up during full production. It’s more a QA problem than a design problem. Otherwise every phone would have had a broken screen by now.
No, I assure you it’s just boredom.
More like, how to push people to buy more.
I’m pretty sure apple will have to refund these under warranty. Two broken screens you could put down to user error but they can hardly claim that all the customers fault.
Apparently apple didn’t bother to QC a new product category.
yeah, is not like this is news
For me it’s the synchronized flipping
I just want a phone that I can comfortably reach all points on with one thumb without having to juggle it about.
So when foldables started getting attention i was hoping they’d make smaller phones that unfolded to have average sized screens.
Instead we got average sized phones that unfold in to a tablet. Even the vertical folding ones are too wide.
Unihertz Jelly Star
I loved my jelly star (it’s battery died this year). I would still like something like 1.5x the size of the jelly star. The jelly max kinda disappointed me with somehow removing features from the smaller phone whilst somehow still being as chonky.
I don’t use Android. Can you de-google it at least somewhat? I would consider giving it to a kid as a cheaper harder to break phone.
Running LineageOS on my Jelly Star. Only thing that doesn’t work is the nifty LED ring on the back.
Thanks
Drives me crazy how small phones died because “not enough demand” but a fragile gimmicky $2000 folding phone is perfectly commercially viable
All tech is killing off budget options because of the increasing percentage of wealth owned by the top 1% who will just buy the most expensive option without regard for features or practicality.
Small phones would be cheap and cheap phones break the illusion that 2000$ phones are normal.
It has nothing to do with demand, it’s just that the bottom 99% isn’t a profitable market segment anymore.
Seems like more people rant online about small phones than buy them.
I guess the problem is that the kind of person who buys a small phone is also the kind of person who only buys a phone once every 5+ years.
If they can’t milk you for $1000 every year they’ll just give up trying to sell you anything. :P
That and there’s a good chance they buy second hand, too.
Still rocking my 13 mini, with no intention to upgrade. Definitely need to replace the battery soon though.
Certainly has not bern a shortage of demand for the duo, people have been losing their minds over the thing
Call me crazy but I miss 16:9 5"/5.5" standard smartphones(aka pre 2018) made it possible to comfortably 1-hand. Then they had to switch to doom-scroll long ratio sizes.
Moto razr and I believe there’s a samsung one which does just that
Of all the foldables, I liked moto’s implementation the best. I don’t want them to fold out to a larger screen. I want them to fold into a smaller form.
I’m sad they didn’t keep the retro razr design language from the second generation onwards and instead just copied samsungs design language and tweaked it. I really liked how the original had a chin that slid the display under slightly when folding so the fold didn’t have to be as drastic and crease inducing
You want small? There you go: https://gadgetbond.com/bluefox-nx1-4-inch-compact-android-15-smartphone/
But yeah, it’s a shame there isn’t really a market with competition. Basically all serious phones are already too big for my taste. I have an iPhone 13 Mini and that is already slightly too big and I couldn’t even replace that with a similar sized one if I wanted to.
The Unihertz Titan 2 Elite is surprisingly small. The Minimal Phone 2 might be as well. And they have physical keyboards — yay.
Oof a cutout on such a small phone is awful. Just give it a little forehead (and chin) then it can also fit in an even bigger battery
sadly, no 5G on these phones
What’s that? Smartphone for ants?
Comfortably reach all points with one thumb? Would that not be really small? For me that would be like 1/2 the size of a normal phone when I don’t actually hold it but just having it lay on my hand (aka high drop risk). When I actually hold it like usual I can reach, with that is thumb, maybe 1/4th?
you need bigger hands. /s
Didn’t one company basically made a GBA SP kind of phone, where you fold vertically to make a small square?
Edit: samsung galaxy z flip i think
Yeah, they are on the 8th generation. My wife has an older one, she’s pretty happy with it. She got it with her contract, so paying about 30 euros for 24 months for the phone and service, average price actually.
And Motorola razr 70 and 60.
I have seen one of these, folds lengthways into more of a square shape. No idea what the model is though.
Z flip series from samsung. Crazy expensive though, I don’t know if there are any reasonable alternatives
Motorola’s Razr is probably 300-400 less. But Ive never owned any of them
The problem with all of those types is that they’re still too wide to reach across with a firm grip.
Yeah, I’m on Pixel 10a, which is ostensibly the same size as the 7a I had prior, and for that I give a real half-hearted thanks to Google for at least not making it bigger. I still miss phones the size of my s4. I want a phone that discourages watching long form content, and we’re unfortunately in the opposite direction.
How much could it cost to design and mass produce a phone that’s exactly the size I want?
I had to stop with the pixels after the 3. The 3 was already my upper limit on size and i wanted a slightly smaller phone. Sadly at the time i upgraded their was only bigger phones and then the jelly star which is tiny. I got the jelly star and it lasted me a good few years before the battery fully crapped out on me, but i would still prefer a phone in-between those two sizes.
Ahhh, for the old days! When the phone was bolted to the wall in the hallway and had a 3ft/1m cord! Those things were capable of lasting for a generation without issue. They just weren’t very portable. And long distance rates were a thing. And party lines.*
We’re like 10+ years past the point where new smartphone features were worth something. Now we’re back to buying new phones because the last one finally died, not to upgrade.
i really just wish we had some options for “old” features. like a slide-out keyboard
Some Chinese phones are interesting. I particularly like the ones with lofic camera sensors, or crazy attachable lens modules, but there are all sorts of niche devices.
What made them boring is the homogeneity. Like aliens designed them, have no idea what an actual human would want, but know they have to build one bland universal thing for everyone.
I want the Xaomi 18 Pro Max pretty hard. I record a fair bit of selfie video so being able to use the back camera for that with the preview screen would be dope.
The LG Wing is also my favorite phone of all time. I like fun phones. Unfortunately, fun phones don’t really seem to sell very well.
For selfies, have you considered a pocketable gimbal cam instead?
They’re getting ridiclously good. The DJI 4P in particular has more dynamic range than most cinema cameras: https://www.cined.com/dji-osmo-pocket-4p-lab-test-rolling-shutter-dynamic-range-and-exposure-latitude/
…This is better than the results we got for the current leader in terms of dynamic range, the ARRI Alexa 35 (and, there is a factor of 100x in price between the two).
That, plus a gimble, means its basically better than any near-term phone. I’d already have one, but… TBH, I don’t really do selfies.
How big are your pockets?
The specific weird use case is making a quick short vertical video on my walk that I just upload without editing from my phone while still on the walk. They’re companions containing BTS and whatnot to my high-effort long-form videos where I do use different cameras. The whole point is that it’s low effort and low friction for me.
Gimbal cams (and many mirrorless cameras these days) auto-transfer recordings to the phone, so it should be nearly as frictionless as a phone recording.
And gimbals are great for walking in particular, as they stabilize footage in a way a phone (and most ILCs) simply can’t.
It does sound like it’d be overkill though.
Yeahhhh, but auto-transfer would be annoying when I record 1TB+ of footage for a long-form video. I’d have to manually transfer, which is an extra step, and I’m not interested in that haha.
…You record 1TB+ of footage on your phone?
Well, IDK about your workload then, heh. But those pocket cams do record to microSD cards, FYI.
Xaomi 18 Pro Max, while with a really weird name looks really beautiful & sleek, it’s like the optimistic future frutiger aero phone, if I HAD to pick a smart phone & I had a thousand pounds to spare it would probably be that.
But I don’t find the LG Wing appealing personally based on a glance, the screen thing just feels bloaty, I don’t see the milage you can get out of it.
As for the Wing, I don’t think another phone (aside from foldables) allows you to run 3 apps at once. It’s great for multitasking. I often watch a video on one screen while texting on another. It’s just great.
Oh that actually sounds really useful.
Squints.
…I thought that looked silly at first, but that’s actually not a bad design. Its way more practical than Apple’s foldable for sure.
Calling it Apples foldable when foldables have been made for years is weird but yeah. It was great.
My phone was 5 years old when I got it second hand. What really would a new one give at this point? Just look for the supported device list on calyx/graphene/etc and pick one that fits your budget that you can get second hand.
I’m currently using a Samsung Galaxy phone that’s old enough to still have an SD card slot. I’m dreading the day that it dies and I have to pay 10x the amount for 1/2 the storage capacity.
How much do you need permanently on the phone? Could get a NAS or what ever you feel like really to keep it on. Obviously backed up if its important.
It’s not really anything that I need to keep, it’s more principal than anything. I could probably delete a couple hundred gigs of photos, music & memes and never notice it was gone. The fact that I can have a couple hundred gigs of frivolous data that I carry everywhere is just a flex, lol.
My wife gets the “your iPhone storage is full” message about every 3 months and has to go on a deleting spree; I have photos saved from a decade ago just because I can.
I have a USB C flash drive that I bought to put SteamOS on my steam deck when I upgraded the drive, so I have the ability to move stuff off my phone, I just don’t have to, so I don’t.
I see my PC (or home network as a whole?) as my primary device, phone just happens to be one I can easily carry away from the LAN to use offline for a while. Or with minimal 5G data for memes. 3GB/£5 a month.
honestly just get whatever phone and buy a proper digital camera, you’ll save money. i did this with music, cancelled spotify, got an mp3 player, now i dont really care whether my phone has a headphone jack for my iems.
My reason would be: I don’t want to carry multiple devices around. Sure, there are also upsides; if I drop my camera while hiking I still have a phone. But so far I am happier with everything on this single point of failure. Often I don’t need anything besides my phone at all. I can communicate, navigate, film, photograph, listen to music, pay, and soon even identify myself (once my ID and drivers license are in a digital wallet).
i hate having everything on one device. makes it one point of failure.
Same here. Add car key and house key as well.
I still carry my wallet around, but just as a backup, I don’t take it out of my pocket all day long.
I already have a full frame DSLR but the phone camera is usually up there for any purpose I take pictures for, not to mention the massive zoom range. Unlike the big, bulky camera I actually have the phone with me all the time.
I suggest the opposite: spend the money on one device instead of 2. I was also at the exact position of the other person with the S20 being the last galaxy with SD. Sucks that they squeeze users so much and they just take it.
i prefer many cheap devices to one expensive device
Cheap cameras are garbage. That was true even before smartphones destroyed that market, now it is not even the same ballpark.
If you keep it long enough till it wont work on newer networks, your carrier might offer you one for free. I got my Pixel 6 pro for free because my old Galaxy didn’t support the 5g networks. I was forced to upgrade so they gave me the phone.
Sprint made me buy a new phone to ditch my pixel 2a, then never turned off the 4g network where I live.
They tried to get me to buy a new one. I just kept ignoring them. Eventually they sent me a letter saying to come get a free one.
My phone is a couple years old, but is a flagship. I bought it because I love emulators and ROMs, and now GameNative opened up my whole steam library.
That, and the camera are the big selling points. An older, cheaper, phone would not have 16 gigs of RAM, or a processor that can handle any of that.
Whether that’s worth $1,000 to you is definitely a question.
I would rather spend £1k on something else. My phone was £500 new, but I paid £200 or so as it was second hand. Came with a 5 year warranty from when I bought it still, though I expect all k would get is store credit.
The day gamenative supports civ v will be a very unproductive week for me.
I bought a new smartphone because I wanted to escape US tech oligarchs. One could call that a feature as well I guess.
Depending on what google do over the coming years I may just go back to a brick phone and get a small cheap laptop with Linux on it to carry around for anything fun. Backpack with a power bank for mains voltage perhaps? Some low spec laptops have pretty low power requirements though.
There’s pocket PCs like the Mecha Comet coming out nowadays. I’m not the early adopter type, but it’s an interesting alternative to consider in the future to me.
Now that Factorio is on Arm I could consider it. Still kinda dislike the lack of a generic boot loader that just works across any device though.
I solved this problem with a GPD Win Max 2, which is just a regular computer that folds up to about the size of a small hardcover book. You can run regular (i.e. PC compatible) operating systems and programs on it. It has a closed source UEFI firmware to my knowledge, but there’s still nothing stopping you from running Linux on it. The current version is the 3 and is alas not cheap, probably due to the whole RAMpocalypse thing.
Possibly with the aid of an external monitor, you could easily use the thing as your only computer. It just so happens to also fit in the pocket of your JNCOs.
For what it’s worth it also charges via USB power delivery, so the same battery brick I use to extend my Steam Frame’s run time will happily charge my Win Max as well, although I have no real world use case for that capability whatsoever.
Ohhh very high spec there, does explain the high price though.
A power bank with mains voltage? For a laptop?
To plug its normal charger into. I guess you could get a 12v one instead though.
Same, the “best” features of my current phone is the user replaceable battery and certfied fair wages for employees involved with making this thing
I love the clamshell form factor, but it should be two screens, not one delicate one stretched such that it will always show a crease and will fail after a year…
So, the first one I had (1st gen DS) fell of a table on the hinge and broke. I eventually got a new case from China and got it working. Second one, 3DS XL, I was playing around with a katana and struck my leg, but I had a 3DS in a baggy pocket so I hit that instead, right on the hinge. It survived though, just has a small battle scar now.
I took this as a sign to not use foldable electronics.
Edit: Now that I think about it… My GBA SP didn’t get any of its hinges hurt while in my possession… so 2/3 I suppose.
I’ve owned GBA, NDS, 3DS, and my brother had the DS Lite. Every Gen 1 DS I’ve seen has had its hinge break eventually. All the others on this list seem more durable. My GBA in particular went through some rough spots.
But yeah, adding moving parts is always going to add more points of failure.
Laptops work pretty well in that regard. Sure, I saw a few with broken hinges over the years, but saying that hinges don’t work is overblown IMO.
(And I say this as an owner of a 1st gen DS with broken hinge. That was probably a design error.)
Yeah, man. Look at how well-protected those screens are when you flip it closed! I don’t care what version of Gorilla Glass+++ you have, no one’s throwing a smartphone in a backpack or laptop bag without good screen protection…
I mean, yes, but DS hinges are actually pretty prone to cracking.
But at least you can replace the shell if it happens.
Folding up like that is potentially very robust if it’s done right, keeps your screen safe. Personally I’d also go for a screen+keyboard combo (wow I just invented the laptop). A thin keyboard that doubles up as a screen protector, that should be a thing
We used to have a few designs like that.
The outsides were just basic phone, so they were durable
I used to own one of these bad boys
Ridiculously cool, you basically transform into James Bond if you’re using one of those. It was actually quite practical as well. But what I think would be a good modern take on that would be essentially a phone case that’s a keyboard, so you keep the basic smartphone design intact, with the processor battery etc behind the screen. No reason for it not to be removable either. There’s some generic large versions of that but if that was part of the phone design you could do it very compact and cute.
One of my favorite phones I ever owned.
Wasn’t the Surface Duo actually 2 seperate screens?
Yeah and no one bought it because two screens is actually a terrible idea. The whole point of a foldable screen is a tablet in your pocket, would two screens you can’t do that.
The two screen folding phone is literally useless product category which is why only Microsoft made it, everyone else could see it was a stupid idea and didn’t bother.
Have you used a phone like this for a while or are you saying how you think you’ll feel?
i was hoping for a vertical iphone flip phone so it would be smaller oh well
Apple iPhone duo != all foldable phones.
There’s more out there, folks.
The title of this comic (which is from 2019), is: “Galaxy Fold vs Flip Phone”. OP unfortunately didn’t include the title. Nor the bonus panel.
Impossible. Apple just came out with it. Others couldn’t have copied Apple that fast. Stop lying.
This comic apparently comes out when the first foldable smartphone comes out, which have the similar issue.
