The rumors about the new Samsung Galaxy Z phone having a foldable glass screen have been confirmed. Is there any idea how many real-world folds you can expect from a glass screen like that before it shatters, or is novel enough that nobody really knows yet?
“Molecular fatigue” makes cowards of us all … eventually. When that will be remains to be seen.
I would suggest that you not run right out and buy one. I always wait with new tech. I let those who need to have “the newest the fastest” be my guinea pigs. After 6 months to a year, I join the club.
I’ll just note that I know the article I linked says 200,000 folds, but what marketing says and what actually happens aren’t necessarily closely connected.
I was ready to get all sneery about how it’s not glass, it’s plastic and the screen itself is OLED. Luckily, I read the article and it is indeed ultra-thin glass at the fold point!
Anyway, I’m not sure there could be a GQ answer to this, since this seems to be a pretty new product. I’m mainly posting to say, hey, learn something new every day.
I would hate to have to be aware of this, every time I opened my phone only to see that I had a spam email or a garbage phone call. On the other hand, if the estimate is true*, 200 times a week seems like a lot (for me), and 1000 weeks is almost 20 years, so maybe I would be able to just forget it.
*Big if.
Cnet will likely post results shortly. They used a robot to test the Galaxy Fold and new Razr less than a week ago, so the Z Flip should be next.
There’s actually a little screen on the outside that shows your notification.
Couldn’t they get 95% of the effect (of a large folding screen) with two separate screens separated by a very thin bezel?
Sure, but it would have only 2% the cool.
So what you are saying is that the coolness is inversely proportional to the size of the bezel? Or is it an all or nothing for the other 98% of style points?
Or just make a single screen the same size. It doesn’t appear to be significantly bigger than large phones already on the market.
But it’s significantly smaller in your pocket.
This is a feature I really want. I joked years ago that I wanted a silly-putty phone, where I could crunch it into a little ball or stretch it out to a big screen. This is probably as close as I can get to my ideal.
Personally, I plan to wait until the kinks are worked out, and we all know how long the thing lasts. But I’m excited to see these phones coming to the market.
They could, but it would be a hard sell. People generally don’t want practical phones. Judging by the lines of people who camp out overnight in front of the stores when a new model is released, they want WOW! phones. They want NOBODY ELSE HAS THIS! phones. Two separate displays is soooo 2019.
The funny thing is how I had a RAZR phone way back when. My manager was visiting and when she saw it, she exclaimed “It’s all SCREEN!” :o
The problem is, smartphone & tablet apps are designed to be used in full-screen mode all the time. And the gap is always there, right in the middle of the screen. It will cause problems with many types of apps - imagine having to watch Youtube or Netflix videos with a black bar right in the middle of the screen all the time. You might think, just let those apps run on one screen. But Android & iOS don’t support multi-screen devices.
Microsoft is working on a dual-screen Android device though. And it will be more than just an Android tablet with 2 screens working as one. It will run a custom version of Android that does support different dual-screen modes - e.g. home screen on one screen and an app in the other, or two separate apps in the 2 screens, or one app spanning 2 screens, etc. Some apps may even be designed to take advantage of 2 screens - e.g. photo editing app that shows adjustment controls on one screen and the photo on the other.
I saw an article about a patent from Apple for a foldable screen hinge. It’s geared at both ends of the fold so when you open in, there’s nothing in the way, but as you close, these little tabs come out and insert themselves into the ends of fold. So instead of a sharp fold, the tabs force a more cylindrical fold with a small but actual radius curve. Downside obviously is it makes the device when folded a millimeter or two thicker, but prevents forcing a crease into the screen.
Yeah, when I first heard about folding smartphones, this is what I thought we were getting, and not that ridiculous book-folding thing. I don’t need the screen to be bigger, I need the phone itself to be smaller! I just got a new iPhone 11 and while I like it, it’s freakin’ humongous. If I could fold it in half, that would be amazing.
You can buy something similar right now.
I know how you feel, I just had to replace my phone, it is almost 4 years old and started dying [ touchscreen is starting to malfunction and the power socket broke so I could only power it wirelessly, and do the cloud share for data] so we went to the store for our provider and everything except some of the nonsmart folding phones were larger than what I had, and I ended up with a Sonim XP8.