The Compromises of Folding Phones

Dominic Preston, reporting for The Verge earlier in July:

A year after overhauling its Z Fold phone with a radically thinner design, Samsung has changed things up again, this time altering the shape entirely. The Z Fold 8 is wider than any of Samsung’s previous foldables, and shorter too, a size and shape somewhere between Samsung’s traditional Flip and Fold models. In photos, I wasn’t impressed by the squat shape. In person, to my surprise, it feels great, and almost immediately intuitive. If you want to get a feel for it yourself, grab your passport — the Z Fold 8 is about the same height and less than half an inch more narrow. This isn’t Samsung’s only new foldable this year, and in fact, its lineup just got more confusing. The Z Fold 8 may be the official follow-up to last year’s impressive Z Fold 7, but in truth the Z Fold 8 Ultra is the straightforward sequel. That phone has the same squarish inner screen as previous Z Fold phones and a similar triple rear camera. The name feels like a sly trick to get around this year’s inevitable price hikes: Samsung slapped “Ultra” on the box of its highest-end model to help cover for pricing the phone at $2,099.99, up $100 from the Z Fold 7.

I don’t have much interest in Samsung phones but nevertheless have been linking to Samsung Unpacked news for years now. What’s more intriguing to me is this new form factor, which is widely speculated to be the same as that of the folding iPhone due in about six weeks. The first generation of folding smartphones, beginning with the Galaxy Fold in 2019, had long, narrow front screens and square inner screens. This aspect ratio made both screens less than ideal to use: the front screen was too narrow, and the inner screen wasn’t wide enough to be used as a tablet. This new “squat” form factor sacrifices vertical length for width, making the inner screen much more useful while sacrificing day-to-day use of the front screen.

I think this is the way to go, and I remember saying so when …