Foldable phones are all the rage: are they worth the cost?

Following the advances in the world of smartphones, it has become conveniently boring . Every year we see how the number of the phone increases in one unit, as we have better cameras, more battery, a brighter screen and one of the new features of the operating system that you can read with the fashion talk in the world of there technology .

But this format was the natural path for an industry determined to renew its equipment portfolio every year to leave no margin of advantage to its competitors. Users, on the other hand, gain in simplicity: having a clear budget is as simple as going for the latest or penultimate model launched by the brand you want and the experience will be more or less the same .

We are living the end of the Darwinian process of smartphones, after the crazy years of experimentation of the last decade, where it was not uncommon to see “the first phone with a 3D screen”, “the first phone with which you can also watch TV” or phones for gamers that literally included a PlayStation controller behind their screen.

Today all this research of the different refined and even though there will be devices with the best camera, with the biggest battery, with big or small screens, or with an apple printed on the back, all of them are ultimately just big black rectangles that struggle to stand out in a space that is already predefined.

But in 2019, a new technology came along to breathe new life into an industry determined to post better numbers. We’re talking about THE flexible screens a system derived from OLED technology, which allows the generation of a screen so thin that it is able to bend without breaking. These are plastic screens protected by layers that not only protect them from scratches, but also increase visibility and have opened up a new world of formats for a market that, until then, did not know it needed them.

It was in 2019 when a Chinese company called Royole launched the Flexpai considered to be the first foldable phone in history. It was essentially a 7.8-inch tablet that could be folded inward. If you’ve never heard of it, it’s because it clearly didn’t go very well .

But later that same year, Samsung would introduce the Galaxy Fold its own version of the product, but now designed for a global audience. But its arrival was not very encouraging either: despite its innovative format, delays in the launch and errors on the screens meant that it did not receive the best reception. Perhaps it was the cost of adopting a new format and the fact that people were not used to using it.

Five years later and with a pandemic, foldable phones are already another category in the market. Samsung It will launch its sixth generation of these devices this year and brands are already fighting for leadership in the segment. But, Who are these teams really for? And five years after its launch on the market, Should we watch it from afar or start wondering if our next phone will be foldable?

All this thinking started because a week ago I was testing the newly released software Moto Razr 50 Ultra of Motorola the latest folding device to arrive in the country. It is a phone in the “flip” format – formerly known as a shell – whose screen does not fold vertically, but horizontally, and instead of being a tablet, it is a traditional phone that can shrink and become more compact.

It’s a direct heir to the RAZR phones that were launched 20 years ago and made Motorola the coolest brand in the mobile phone world at the time. But in two decades, everything changes. If Motorola’s first RAZR sold 50 million units in two years, today the entire folding market in the world considering all makes and models, or 15.9 million units according to the consultant Trend strength . This represents 1.4% of the global smartphone market and it is not expected to reach 2% until 2025.

Even with this insignificant margin, we see how, year after year, without further delay, better and different models are launched on the market. In 2023 for example, Google presented his Pixel Folding which while it doesn’t mean a big change in terms of the market, we can see that the company behind Android now wants its operating system to look good on a phone that folds.

Something that, in the case of the Moto Razr 50 Ultra, is already beginning to be noticed. On top of that, The phone dazzles as a fashion accessory . It’s a phone that It attracts attention with its small size and neat aesthetics. which, to return to the first paragraphs, is already an advantage.

But beyond that, does it have any virtues? I would say that more than being flexible, what I like most is that it has an extra screen : There is the big screen in the center, which is the one that can be folded and we also have a small 3.6-inch square screen that appears on the phone when it is closed. This small screen, which goes against the grain of all the increasingly large phones today, is fully functional for the first time in a model of this type.

You can make calls, read emails, reply to messages, listen to and change music and all this without having to access the main module of the device. And of course, take photos, lots of photos, because you can use the main modules of the phone to take selfies, group photos and even imitate a photo booth.

But is it enough to say that a small screen can make us think that we are facing a major innovation? And more importantly, At what price ?

In my opinion, a foldable like the Moto Razr 50 Ultra is a demonstration in both hardware and software that a device can be so small and work with virtually no setbacks, taking into account that we will need small fingers and that content such as YouTube or TikTok videos will appear even smaller. Fortunately for these cases, just open the phone and that’s it.

But for a user already accustomed to the performance of traditional phones, All the newness and innovation of the team is lost when you start to value performance. . When you realize that, for example, to keep a device thin and flexible, the battery must or must last less, or that it only has two main cameras instead of the five that my phone has. Or that its narrower form factor doesn’t work with most of the games that I usually carry on my computer.

There is another factor to consider that is very important about these phones: the price . One of the keys to the success of the original RAZR is that, for its time, it was a device that, while not one of the cheapest, was close to what was normal in the pre-smartphone era. Today, we already have types of phones: we have the low-end, the mid-range and the high-end, and moving from one to the other changes the digital neighborhoods.

The problem is that while foldables are great for, say, move from average to high experience the price they charge is the same as the most expensive models of the year. We are talking about equipment worth more than a million pesos, and at those prices, between opting for a phone that is just different and another that is worth the same but is the top of the range of the year, the decision is simpler than it seems.

Motorola wanted to change this paradigm and offers the phone at 660,000 Chilean pesos, anchored in a store and a particular plan. Otherwise, if you want to take it out, its price is 1.2 million. And the technology used to achieve it the screen being flexible it is still too expensive and after five years of unchanged prices, such a mid-range model is not visible in the short term.

Human beings are animals of habit and at least I, as a traditional user, can no longer escape this circle. But that does not mean that, every time a foldable phone appears and I can try it, the weeks I have it are weeks in which I begin to remember the times when technology surprised and tried to become relevant, only to find myself with what we, the market, are used to: missing the increasingly large numbers that, year after year, illuminate presentations around the world.