[Answer] What do you think of the recently revealed foldable phones? Will foldables be a new trend in 2019?

[Answer] What do you think of the recently revealed foldable phones? Will foldables be a new trend in 2019?

I saw ZTE unveil the first foldable phone at a trade show last year, but it didn’t make much of an impact. It wasn’t until Huawei’s launch half a year later that the industry really began to take foldable phones seriously, which shows just how much ZTE’s influence has declined. The old “Zhonghua Coolpad Lenovo” era—ZTE, Huawei, Coolpad, and Lenovo—has now basically been reduced to just one dominant player: Huawei. And ZTE, once seen as Huawei’s most likely competitor, has already fallen far behind and can no longer compete on the same level.

Back to the phones themselves: from a user-experience perspective, foldable screens are certainly an innovation, but not a revolutionary one. In fact, they may not even turn out to be a successful innovation. In the fast-growth phase of the smartphone industry, when ideas were flying everywhere, something like this might have been killed off early as just a concept. But now the industry broadly lacks innovation. Since Apple and everyone below it have struggled to make real breakthroughs, features like multi-camera systems and foldable screens have become the kind of “innovations” that companies can heavily market as selling points. If the former still offers real advantages, such as zoom, the latter may very well end up as a major failure in the history of smartphone innovation—though that will also depend on how much manufacturers invest in marketing and production.

Where are the users for foldable phones? If people want a large-screen experience, tablets and big-screen phones already meet that need. If foldables do not bring a true revolution but merely pull some users away from tablets, then their significance is minimal. And an oversized screen obviously creates plenty of inconvenience. Most likely, these fold-out large screens will end up being impractical in most situations, with little real use. Under those circumstances, if the foldable-screen experience is not good enough, even that initial group of users may quickly abandon it.

Technically speaking, foldable screens are probably not mature enough for large-scale commercial use. Glass cannot be folded in everyday use, so the folding section of the screen has to rely on plastic-like transitional materials. In terms of wear resistance, that is far inferior to glass. Once unfolded, the display quality will inevitably be affected, and the phone’s lifespan will also be significantly shortened. In addition, because a double-layer screen is inherently thicker, battery capacity becomes another weakness if the device is to avoid becoming too bulky. These two shortcomings are not something that can be solved overnight. As a result, foldable phones are likely to remain toys for a small group of users rather than a product category with major growth potential.